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COPYRIGHT DEPOSnv 



The BOOK of the POE 
CENTENARY 



A Record of the Exercises at the Uni- 
versity of Virginia January 16-19, 
1909, in Commemoration of the 
One Hundredth Birthday 
of Edgar Allan Poe 



EDITED BY 

Charles W. Kent, Linden Kent Memorial School of 
English Literature 

AND 

John S, Patton, Librarian 



UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA 
1909 






^^'^ 



Copyright, 1909 

BY THE 

University of Virginia 



The Michie Company, Printers 

Chari,ottesvii,i,E, Va. '-~~r,,-,MpnFSS 

1 Two v:;cuies Received 

WAY 151909. 

L copynent Entry 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Edgar Allan Poe 1 

II. In the Jeeeerson Society . . 5 

III. In the Chapel 11 

IV. In Cabell Hall: The Ravens 15 
V. In Madison Hall 34 

VI. In Cabell Hall, Again . . 100 

VII. In No. 13 West Range ... 186 

VIII. In the Minds oe Men ... 191 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

'nr^HE University of Virginia has nothing 
-^ with which to reproach herself in her 
treatment of Edgar Allan Poe. Through ill 
report and good he was followed with her ma- 
ternal solicitude and misgivings, but never with 
her reproof or wrath. In his college days she 
may have been too lenient, but in the days of 
his fame she is not constrained by any hobgob- 
lin of consistency to withhold her praise. She 
has, therefore, had peculiar pride in witnessing 
his universal acclaim as a man of genius and as 
a singularly forceful agency in compelling in- 
ternational recognition of our American liter- 
ature. Her anxiety is no longer lest he be not 
recognized at his real worth, but lest, in the 
ardor of revived enthusiasm, his real merit, 
however high, be overrated and his rightful 
place, so tardily won, jeopardized by claims too 
sweeping and superlative. 



2 POE CENTENARY 

The celebration of the Poe centenary at the 
University of Virginia has served, however, as 
a corrective: first, of the persistent misstate- 
ments of his earlier biographers, and then of 
the unsettled or adverse judgment of his liter- 
ary rank. 

Edgar Allan Poe entered the University on 
the fourteenth of February, 1826, and did not 
leave until the twentieth of December. By the 
way, the many errors and uncertainties as to 
Poe's stay at the University are due to a mis- 
understanding of the period covered by the 
session of 1826. It began on the first of 
February and continued without break or holi- 
day to the fifteenth of December, so that in- 
stead of leaving during the session, as has 
been asserted in various forms of ignorance or 
malignity, he was in the University from two 
weeks after the session opened until five days 
after the session closed. Nor was he dis- 
ciplined by suspension, expulsion, personal 
reprimand, or in any other way during that 
long session. He did fall once under suspicion 
of misconduct, but in that particular case was 
innocent. 

His career was not entirely calm and placid 



POE CENTENARY 3 

in that stormy session, but notwithstanding 
alleged irregularities he was commended for 
Italian translation, reported among the 
"passed" in Latin and French, and, in addition, 
was known to the librarian as a free reader of 
good books, to his fellow-students as a gifted 
author of undergraduate tales never published, 
and probably of poems afterwards published 
in the volume of 1827. Among those who 
applauded his achievements, yet deplored the 
errancies of his later life, were his brother 
alumni; and in that small company of sincere 
mourners who followed his storm-tossed and 
wrecked body to its humble grave were repre- 
sentatives of his alma mater. 

When the semi-centennial of his death 
came, the University of Virginia unveiled, with 
services so significant as to attract the atten- 
tion of the cultivated world, the Zolnay bust 
of Poe, the most striking and satisfactory 
artistic representation of the poet extant.* 
Through this successful and significant celebra- 
tion the University of Virginia's connection 

*There were then but two monuments to Poe: 
his tombstone in Baltimore and the Actors' Monu- 
ment in the Metropolitan Museum of New York. 



4 POE CENTENARY 

with Poe became so widely known that as the 
centennial of his birth approached, it was 
taken for granted by the foreign and domestic 
press that the supreme appreciation of this 
noted event would be shown at this University. 
That these high expectations might not be 
disappointed, the President of the University 
of Virginia appointed a committee to provide 
for some adequate recognition of the cente- 
nary. The committee, consisting of Charles 
W. Kent, James A. Harrison, and William H. 
Faulkner, with the hearty support of the 
Faculty, students, community, and especially 
the President, arranged the programme set 
forth in this volume officially sanctioned. 

In this book no record can be made of the 
brilliancy or enthusiasm of the audiences, no 
representation of the spectacular features of 
the entertainment, but the substantial contribu- 
tions to Poe criticism and the distinct acknowl- 
edgement of Poe's far-sweeping fame are here 
presented to the public with grateful thanks to 
all who by participation or presence did honor 
to Poe's memory, and with a solemn sense of 
chastened but lasting joy that our great 
alumnus has at last come so fully to his own. 



II 

IN THE JEFFERSON SOCIETY 

' I ^HE Jefferson Literary Society was estab- 
-*■ lished in the early months of the session 
of 1825, and Poe became a member in 1826. 
The first public event of the centenary was a 
celebration by this Society on the evening of 
the 16th. Interest in the occasion and the spe- 
cial programme drew many to the Jefferson 
Hall in spite of the prevailing severe snow 
storm. The programme, arranged by students 
to do honor to their famous predecessor, 
expressed well the attitude of the student body 
to him. The committee on programme was 
Paul Micou, chairman; L. M. Robinette, O. 
R. Easley, G. F. Zimmer, and A. B. Hutzler. 
Mr. Paul Micou presided and welcomed the 
audience, promising that none of the speakers 
would attempt elaborate criticism of the poet's 
life and works. The place of oratorical trib- 
utes and dramatic recital of poems would be 

5 



6 POE CENTENARY 

taken by simple descriptions of Poe's life at the 
University, the student activities in his day and 
the founding of the Society. 

Mr. H. H. Thurlow, of New York, gave the 
necessary setting for the programme in a short 
sketch of the poet's life, not omitting the 
pathetic story of his varying fortunes in the 
several cities in which he sojourned. 

The Washington Literary Society had been 
invited to take part in the programme, and Mr. 
DeRoy R. Fonville, of North Carolina, was 
present as its delegate. Mr. Fonville, whose 
theme was "The Pathos in the Lives of Our 
Southern Poets," pictured the pitiful struggles 
that had so large a share in the lives of Lanier, 
Hayne and Timrod, reaching in Poe's life the 
climax of his story. The courage and dignity 
of these gifted men in the midst of the sore 
perplexities of their artistic lives received 
sympathetic treatment. 

The natural pride of the Jefferson Society in 
having had Poe as a member suggested the 
theme for Mr. W. P. Powell, of Virginia — 
"Poe and the Jefferson Literary Society." Mr. 
Powell told his audience that the life of the 
Jefferson Society has been almost co-equal with 



POE CENTENARY 7 

that of the University, if we date the institution 
from the beginning of its first session, and that 
the poet was an active member, and, for at least 
one meeting, temporary secretary. He seems 
to have addressed the Society only once, and 
then his theme was "Heat and Cold," Mr. 
Powell drew some legitimate inferences as to 
Poe's sociability from the fact of his member- 
ship in the "Jeff." 

Many interesting anecdotes and curious facts 
about the poet's University year were told by 
Mr. A. B. Hutzler, of Virginia. In the course 
of his address on "Poe at the University of 
Virginia," he pointed out that despite the law- 
lessness of that session Edgar Poe appeared 
on the minute-book of the faculty but once, and 
that in that case it was merely to give testi- 
mony in an affair about which he proved to 
be ignorant. His evident literary and artistic 
gifts were shown even then by his story-telling 
to friends gathered at the fireside in No. 13, 
and the decoration of his dormitory with 
crayon copies of scenes that had caught his 
fancy. In a few words he rehearsed the facts 
which have convinced investigators that No. 
13 West Range is the room that Poe occupied 



8 POE CENTENARY 

after leaving West Lawn, where he was first 
domiciled as a student. 

Mr. J. Y. McDonald, of West Virginia, fol- 
lowed with an address full of humorous stories 
of "Student Life at the University in 1826," 
the year of Poe's residence. He kept his au- 
dience amused with story after story taken 
from faculty minute-books of the almost 
daily trials for violating the strict rules 
prescribing apparel, food, amusements, and 
conduct of the students. It was hard for the 
students in his audience to realize, as ever 
existing at the University, such conditions as 
those record-books and the statutes of the 
time record with grave formality. One fact 
of interest pointed out by Mr. McDonald was 
the close personal touch that Mr. Jefferson 
maintained with the students of his 'Uni- 
versity. The disorders of 1826, due to 
boyish revolt against the prevailing conditions, 
were graphically described. 

Not less entertaining or full of quaint details 
was the address of Mr. A. G. Gilmer, of 
Virginia, on "How the Faculty Fared in 
1826." That their lines had not fallen to them 
in places entirely pleasant was very evident, for 



POE CENTENARY 9 

something like twenty-five expulsions from a 
student body of five times that number pointed 
to a great deal of disorder and probably to 
much that was radically wrong with the system 
under which student self-government was first 
attempted, Mr. Jefferson planned a student 
tribunal to try all cases of misconduct, but no 
student would serve on that court and the 
faculty was forced to another method. Im- 
mediate success was not achieved, but ulti- 
mately there came about a mutual respect and 
forbearance, which solved the hard problem 
of discipline for all time. The attempt to 
procure the entire faculty (with a single ex- 
ception) from abroad was discussed at some 
length, and the characteristics of the importa- 
tions were well described. 

Mr. S. M. Cleveland, of Virginia, closed the 
exercises by an interesting analysis of the 
poems which he believed Poe had written while 
at the University. These were "Tamerlane," 
"Dreams," "Visit of the Dead," "Evening 
Star," "Imitation," "In Youth I Have Known 
One," "A Wandering Being from My Birth," 
"The Happiest Day," and "The Lake." The 
discussion as to whether these poems were 



10 POE CENTENARY 

written at the University was ingenious and 
interesting, if not convincing. Their general 
atmosphere and message were discussed with 
rare insight and critical interpretation. Mr. 
Cleveland drew a comparison between "Tam- 
erlane" as first published and the polished 
poem that appeared later in Poe's life, and 
showed that, though greatly improved in form, 
the underlying spirit was the same. 



Ill 

IN THE CHAPEL 

OUNDAY evening Dr. William A. Barr, 
*^ of St. Paul's Church, Lynchburg, Va., 
preached in the University Chapel on the text 
"Whosoever would become great among you 
shall be your servant," his thesis being that a 
man is great in proportion to his loyalty to his 
highest visions. He made the following 
reference to Poe : 

I believe that the true Poe was an example 
of the very kind of greatness I have described. 
The possession of genius alone does not make 
men great. It is the character back of genius. 
And Poe was consecrated through all his life 
to his vision of beauty and truth. He held to 
it with a tenacity that would not be daunted 
and much of the apparent vagabondage may be 
of the kind that Christ enjoined upon his first 
disciples when he told them that if one city 
11 



12 POE CENTENARY 

would not receive them, to shake its dust from 
their feet and go to another. But after all, 
wherein consists Poe's great moral delin- 
quency? From all that is known of his life 
and work he was pure as the snow, and may 
well stand as a rebuke to the modern literary 
horde who appear to suppose that to be inter- 
esting they must be salacious. Then as to his 
relations in life, whether as ward, as husband, 
or as son to the mother of his beautiful 
Annabel Lee, he appears to have fulfilled these 
relations with tenderness, fidelity and love. If 
it be true that he had an infirmity of temper, 
it is also true that some of the most illustrious 
saints in history have spent their lives in a 
struggle with the same infirmity. And so at 
last his moral delinquency seems to be reduced 
to a single failing and this but on occasions 
when he indulged too freely in the cup. 
According, however, to his own explanation, 
this was the result of a nervous condition into 
which his constitution at times fell. It is fair 
to accept his explanation in the light of the 
modern view that this failing is at times the 
result of disease and for this to give him our 
compassion. 



POE CENTENARY 13 

We have a pen picture of Poe by N. P. 
Willis, in whose employ he spent a number of 
months. It concludes with these words : 
"Through all this considerable period we had 
seen but one presentment of the man : a quiet, 
patient, industrious and most gentlemanly per- 
son, commanding the utmost respect and good 
feeling by his unvarying deportment and 
ability." 

I submit that a man who could have appeared 
to Mr. Willis day after day and month after 
month in this light could not have been so 
bad. And yet we are obliged to admit an 
unspeakable pathos in his short and checkered 
life and above all in its end. Whether, as has 
been maintained, he was drugged, or whether 
found in a helpless condition through his own 
failing, it is unspeakably sad that this fine 
genius should have been used by a set of 
political thugs and left to die like a dog. 

In looking back upon Poe's career, I recall 
the words of Carlyle, written with reference to 
the poet Burns : 

"Alas, his sun shone as through a tropical 
tornado ; and the pale shadow of Death eclipsed 
it at noon! Shrouded in such baleful vapors, 



14 POE CENTENARY 

the genius of Burns was never seen in clear 
azure splendor, enlightening the world. But 
some beams from it did, by fits, pierce through ; 
and it tinted those clouds with rainbow and 
orient colours into a glory and stern grandeur, 
which men silently gazed on with wonder and 
tears." 



IV 

IN CABELL HALL— THE RAVENS 

'HPHE Raven Society, in its celebration of 
-*- the Poe centenary, endeavored to empha- 
size primarily Poe's life and influence from 
the viewpoint of the poet's alma mater. 

The speaker of the evening was an alumnus 
of the University, the poems were by alumni, 
and the evening was closed by a sketch of 
Poe's connection with the University of Vir- 
ginia, illustrated by a set of stereopticon views. 

Mr. H. H. Freeman, organist and choir- 
master of St. John's Church, Washington, 
D. C, was in charge of the music programme. 
A very fitting beginning was his rendition of 
Chopin's "Marche Funebre" as a memorial to 
the great poet. 

Mrs. Charles Hancock sang Oliver King's 
arrangement of *'Israfel." 

Professor Willoughby Reade, of the Depart- 
ment of English and Elocution in the Episcopal 

15 



16 POE CENTENARY 

High School, near Alexandria, Virginia, re- 
cited "The Raven" and "The Bells." 

In interpretation of Poe's purpose in writing 
"The Raven," Mr. Reade said : 

It was with great pleasure, ladies and gentle- 
men, that I accepted the invitation of the 
Raven Society to take part in its exercises 
to-night. To others, however, I shall leave it 
to pronounce encomiums on the genius of the 
man whose centennial we are here met to com- 
memorate, and shall pass at once to the reading 
of his greatest poem. 

I hold it to be a hopeless task to give an 
acceptable reading of a piece of literature 
which one does not understand, or in which 
one sees no more than lies on the printed page. 
And so I offer you, before I read the poem, my 
interpretation of "The Raven." It may not be 
the correct one — I do not claim that — but it 
is the poem as I see and feel it. 

Many theories have been advanced in at- 
tempts to prove why Poe wrote "The Raven." 
Most of us are familiar with the explanation 
which the author himself gives of its origin. 
He says that he sat down and composed it 
deliberately — as he might have played a game 



POE CENTENARY 17 

of chess — that it was a poem of the mind rather 
than of the heart; a statement which even his 
most ardent admirers can hardly credit, know- 
ing, as they do, his disHke for poetry made by 
rule. Indeed, it has been stated that he after- 
ward said that this explanation was but a hoax ! 
To say that it is a mere jingle of rhymes is 
folly: no man ever wrote such a poem as this 
without meaning something. Published two 
years before the death of his wife, it could 
not, as some who are not careful as to dates 
have said, have been inspired by her loss. 

I believe that he wrote the poem because he 
could not help writing it; and, that we might 
not read his heart's dearest secrets, he hides 
this cry of his soul in the wonderful diction, 
the haunting rhyme and rhythm, and the vague 
mystery of this remarkable composition. At 
the time it was written, Poe had travelled far 
on the downward road. The spirit of hope- 
lessness had taken up its abode in his heart. 
All his nobler feelings, however, were not 
dead, and although he seemed to realize that 
this life held but little of good for him, there 
was still, deep in his heart, a hope of some- 
thing better in the hereafter. 



18 POE CENTENARY 

What is this "ancient, grim, and ghastly 
raven" but the spirit of evil which has entered 
the soul of this unhappy man — the spirit of 
Remorse, of Despair? It is never to leave 
him again — the bird itself tells him that this 
is the case in reply to his statement, "On the 
morrow he will leave me." Near the close of 
the poem he tries to drive it away, but the 
effort is a useless one, the last line tells us that. 

And what is this "lost Lenore" but his own 
lost life? Never again on earth will he find 
it young and pure as once it was, but what of 
the hereafter — ay, the hereafter ? Summoning 
all his courage, he asks of this evil spirit the 
great question which every human being asks 
at some time in his life, "Is there, is there balm 
in Gilead?" Is there any hope in the here- 
after ? Driven almost to madness by the bitter 
negation, he asks a second question: 

"Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the 
distant Aidenn, 
It shall clasp a sainted maiden — " 

and when the same mocking "Nevermore" 
falls upon his ear, see how all his nobler 
feelings assert themselves, how strong his 



POE CENTENARY 19 

belief in God, in something better beyond this 
hfe, as he exclaims : 

"Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy 
soul hath spoken." 

O mighty genius ! O blasted life ! O weary 
heart in darkness struggling! God show thee 
mercy in the day of thy judgment, and for 
thy faith grant thee "surcease of sorrow" in 
"that distant Aidenn" where, clasping again 
thy pure young life, thou shalt know the heal- 
ing of that balm of Gilead, and where thy soul 
shall be forever lifted from the shadow of that 
"Nevermore." 

Dr. James Southall Wilson (M. A., 1905), 
professor of History in William and Mary, 
read his poem 

"Whose Heart-Strings Are a Lute" 

[January 19, 1809— October 7, 1849.] 

The angel Israfel 
Sang no more in Heaven'. 

Silent he lay in Hell 
'Neath the flash of the forked levin: 



20 POE CENTENARY 

Mute were the strings of his lyre 
By one great discord shattered; 

Seared by the heat of the fire, 
And the tones of their melody scattered. 

Where the fallen angels dwell, 
Burnt by the forked red levin. 

The angel Israfel 
Sang no more of Heaven. 

When the last mad swirl of the wild red flame 

Died from the darkening sky, 
And Hell burnt scarlet with Heaven's shame 

Purged from the realms on high ; 
In Heaven, mute was the sweetest lute ; 

Silent the holy choir; 
The lyre, the viol, or the lute 

Would never a note suspire: 
For deep in Hell was Israfel, 

And voiceless was his lyre. 

The rivers of God, flowing silently on, 

Never a melody sang; 
And the breezes of Heaven that brought in 
the dawn 

Ghostlike in dumbness upsprang. 
A sadness fell on the seraphim there, 



POE CENTENARY 21 

Watching the great white throne, 
And they longed for the passion of praise and 
prayer 
Israfel's lyre had known ; 
But they offered a prayer to the God of the 
Air, 
Bowed to the great white throne. 

"Oh grant us in pity, great Father of Love, 

Israfel pardoned of wrong, 
Whose lyre caught the breezes of Heaven, and 
w^ove 
Marvelous mazes of song; 
Till one little rift in his lute crept in. 

Marring his musical wire : 
Shall the whole heart be shattered for one 
lone sin? 
Grant us again his lyre!" 
And the Lord God heard and gave them his 

word, 
"Purged he shall be with fire." 

And into the frame of a man there came 

(This was the purging of fire) 
The soul of Israfel out of the flame, 

Israfel, lord of the lyre; 



22 POE CENTENARY 

To fight the battle of evil and good, 

Bound in the body of man; 
For the Lord who had suffered and died on 
the rood 

Knew what suffering can. 
So out of Hell came Israfel, 

Angel and devil and man. 

Then the soul of the music within him awoke ; 

Longings moved in his breast; 
And the chains that had bound him in Hell he 
broke, 

Strong with his soul's unrest ; 
And his man's hand smote from his angel 
lute 

All the anguish of Hell: 
Till the hosts of Heaven and earth grew mute 

Hearing Israfel. 
But the demon within still urged him to sin 

After the manner of Hell. 

And some men saw the demon, and cried, 

"Cast this devil hence!" 
And some men, seeing his angel side. 

Pleaded his innocence; 
But the good Lord, hearing the song divine, 



POE CENTENARY 23 

Spake unto his choir, 
"The soul of Israfel is mine; 

IvOve hath tuned his lyre." 
And the chilly breath of God's messenger, 
Death, 

Stilled the strings of the lyre. 

For the angel and devil had fought a fight 

Close in the breast of man, 
And the angel had won by his music's might 

(This was the good Lord's plan) ; 
And the soul of him passed like a holy strain 

Tunefully up on high, 
But the human heart of him woke again 

Marvelous melody; 
Ay, the soul of him passed like a living blast 

Musically up to the sky. 

The angel Israfel 
Sings evermore in Heaven, 

Pleading for them in Hell 
Burned by the forked levin; 

Pleading for them below, 
Sinful souls and straying, 

Till all the Heaven shall know 
The passion of his playing. 



24 POE CENTENARY 

Where the sinless angels dwell 
Around the great zvhite throne, 

The angel Israfel 
Sings evermore in Heaven. 

Dr. Edward Reinhold Rogers, headmaster 
of The Jefferson School for Boys, Charlottes- 
ville, read his tribute 

To Edgar Ai^lan PoE 

The orchestra of Life once played 

Soul music of a mortal man. 
Whose joys and tears, whose hopes and fears 
The sounding strings intoned and made 

Their strange symphonic plan. 

Wild music rose to greet the ears 

Of those who listening passed along, 
For moans of pain in sad refrain 

Were mingled with the voice of tears 
In melancholy song: 

The bitter cry of hope in vain, 
Discordant jars of wasted youth, 
The deep despair of baffled prayer, 
Ambition's agony of pain. 
Portrayed in sounding truth. 



POE CENTENARY 25 

So harsh the discord in the air, 

To some who stood too near; 

But lost and drowned in grosser sound 

A voice was singing, pure and rare, 

In flute-Hke beauty clear. 

Its song was genius glory-crowned. 
The song of Beauty, radiant, fine. 
The golden heart, the perfect art. 
Of him whose spirit truly found 
The path to things divine. 

Life's orchestra plays o'er the part; 

And we who hear the score today 
By God's own will may listen still 
As discords die by His own art, 

And Beauty holds full sway. 

Bnvoi 

Thy years of grief and bitterness are past, 
No longer toll the bells in sorrow's strain; 
But merrily and cheerily 
In glad refrain 
The silver bells ring worldwide praise at last. 



26 POE CENTENARY 

Dr. Herbert M. Nash (M. D., 1852), of 
Norfolk, Va., was the speaker of the evening. 
Dr. Nash's remarks were of pecuHar interest 
since he was the only speaker during the Cen- 
tenary who had known Poe personally. Poe, 
not long before his death, was visiting a family 
in Norfolk, at whose home Dr. Nash was a 
frequent visitor. 

Dr. Nash said : 

Little did I think that the visits I was pay- 
ing to a beautiful, rosy cheeked, and golden 
haired girl of sixteen, who lived in my neigh- 
borhood some fifty years ago, vx)uld eventuate 
in my appearance here this evening, on the eve 
of the centenary of Edgar Allan Poe. 

Professor Kent, who seems to absorb and 
appropriate information of all sorts, and to 
make use of it to suit himself, seems to have 
learned in some way, I know not how, that 
I had been personally acquainted with the poet. 
He probably communicated this information to 
the president of the Raven Society, and a few 
days ago, I received an invitation from that 
gentleman, backed by a very persuasive note 
from Dr. Kent himself, to be present on this 



POE CENTENARY 27 

occasion and to address you upon my reminis- 
cence of Poe. 

Now I had determined before the receipt of 
the invitation to be here if possible, not to take 
an active part in the celebration of his cen- 
tenary, but only as a looker on, and to enjoy 
what should be said by those more competent 
than myself to do honor to the memory of that 
wonderful man. 

Had the subject to be discussed been a 
medical one, I could not have excused myself 
for not complying with a request for an ad- 
dress; but to enter at so late a day upon a 
field so entirely new to myself required my 
sense of duty to my alma mater to be pricked 
to the very quick, that I might even attempt 
to say a few words here to-night as to the 
impressions made upon my youthful nature 
by the impressive countenance, the dignified 
yet cordial manner, the cadence of the voice, 
and the pressure of the hand of Edgar Allan 
Poe. 

It was in September, 1849, that fortune 
threw me into his presence. The poet visited 
Norfolk, then a comparatively small city, to 
deliver his celebrated lecture on "The Poetic 



28 POE CENTENARY 

Principle;" and while there was the guest of 
Mrs. Susan Maxwell, whose daughter Helen, 
was the attractive nymph before referred to, 
whom I often found it convenient to visit 
and to engage with in the then popular game 
of checkers. 

So here I met and was introduced to the 
distinguished visitor and had the privilege of 
listening to his interesting conversation and 
of hearing him recite some of his favorite 
poems, among them "The Raven," "The Bells," 
and "Annabel Lee." 

I was also present upon the occasion of Poe's 
lecture delivered at the Norfolk Academy, to 
a very fair and delighted audience, and was 
much impressed by the artistic rendering of 
his selections. 

There was nothing that I observed in the 
poet's appearance that indicated excessive 
gloominess or sadness. There was an air of 
dignified repose, which lightened, when speak- 
ing to one, into a pleasing smile. But the 
expression changed quickly and varied with 
the theme that engaged him. I did not notice 
the least awkwardness in his demeanor. 

I trust I have not thus far described an 



POE CENTENARY 29 

imaginary Poe, and that my recollection of 
him on that occasion is essentially correct. 

I have since then met with but one person 
who reminded me, in person, manner and 
bearing, of Poe, and that was the late Dr. 
Marion Sims, whose face was somewhat 
broader, but who was as inventive in another 
field, and as distinguished in his chosen pro- 
fession, as was Poe in the domain of literature. 

In enumerating the studies of Poe, while a 
student in this University, stress has been laid 
upon his extraordinary proficiency in the lan- 
guages; but I have suspected, from the readi- 
ness he evinced in the solution of the enigmas 
and curious problems submitted to him, that 
either he must have been almost as familiar 
with the calculus of probabilities as the great 
La Place himself, or that he was the most 
ingenious guesser the world has ever seen. 

I shall not attempt to dwell upon the poet's 
genius, which has been analyzed and so justly 
praised here by Mr. Mabie on a former happy 
occasion, and which has been written of every- 
where that his matchless creations have been 
read and felt; nor of his contemporaries of 
the nineteenth century, which were legion, in 



30 POE CENTENARY 

every branch of human thought, and of every 
degree of fame in science, in speculative 
thought, in art and hterature. 

Now, what must have been the energetic 
interaction of the cells of his amazing brain 
when engaged in the invention of his marvel- 
ous tales and his unique verses? Like a vol- 
cano in action, throwing out fire and smoke, 
light and darkness, the weird phenomenon at- 
tended by the very quaking of the earth 
around; so that great brain, and body little 
more than frail, so buffeted by the rude fortune 
that seemed almost inseparable from his per- 
sonality, his alter ego, must have quailed at 
times under the stress of his efforts. 

It is confidently asserted that Poe never 
wrote a line while under the influence of alco- 
holic stimulants; on the contrary, when so 
influenced, he was sick almost unto death ! No 
impurity stains his record. 

Byron has written, 

"Man's love is of man's life a thing apart; 
'Tis woman's whole existence." 

But Poe's love was distinctly feminine in 



POE CENTENARY 31 

nature, not to be thrown off as an outer gar- 
ment. It was true. 

I may be pardoned in taking a physician's 
view of his not infrequent mental states. In 
my humble opinion, Poe at such times was the 
victim of an abnormal psychology. There are 
conditions known as the psycho-neuroses of 
exhaustion, during which there is a more or 
less complete paralysis of the will. 

Attacks may ensue similar to, but not iden- 
tical with, epileptic mania. We know that even 
hysteria is sometimes characterized by a dis- 
sociation of consciousness. 

Prof. Janet has defined dipsomania as "in 
reality a crisis of depression in which the sub- 
ject feels the need of being excited by means 
of a poison, the effect of which he knows only 
too well; by alcohol." 

But Poe was certainly no dipsomaniac. As 
a medical man, I have seen cases analogous 
to his, though none possessing even an ap- 
proach to his scintillating intellect. 

They were not drunkards, in the usual ac- 
ceptance of the term. They, also, were the 
victims of psycho-neuroses, morbid, irresistible 
impulsions. 



32 POE CENTENARY 

Mr. Neff then introduced Dr. Charles W. 
Kent, who, in calhng attention to the interest 
attaching to Poe's connection with the Uni- 
versity of Virginia, stated that, while it was 
true that Poe had not made any direct refer- 
ences to his alma mater, it was also true that 
a number of his earlier poems were in 
all probability either prepared or revised at 
the University of Virginia and that he cer- 
tainly cultivated during his session here the 
art of short-story writing. Perhaps, too, he 
was influenced by the surroundings, as well 
he might have been by the new and strange 
life of the young institution. Such thoughts 
as these made pictorial representations of 
the time in which Poe lived at the University 
of especial interest. Following these general 
introductory remarks, ten or a dozen views 
of the early University and the men con- 
nected with its history were thrown on the 
screen and explained one by one. Among 
them were pictures of Dr. Dunglison, who 
was chairman of the faculty during Poe's ses- 
sion; Madison, Monroe and General Cocke, 
members of the Board of Visitors, before 
whom the young poet must have stood his 



POE CENTENARY 33 

final oral examinations ; the Rotunda and Lawn 
in the early days; the exterior and interior of 
No. 13 West Range, where Poe roomed the 
greater part of the session he spent at the 
University, and the Colonnade clubhouse, 
which was in those days the Library; Wil- 
liam Wertenbaker, the librarian appointed by 
Mr. Jefferson, and a scene from the Ragged 
Mountains. 

Mr. H. H. Freeman, organist and choir- 
master of St. John's Church, Washington, 
D. C, played during the evening Chopin's 
Funeral March from the G minor Sonata, ar- 
ranged for the organ* by Sir John Stainer; 
Bohm's Staccato in D flat, arranged for the 
organ by Mr. Freeman; Lemare's Andantino 
in D flat, and Schubert's Military March in D 
major, arranged for the organ by W. T. Best. 

*The organ in Cabell Hall, the gift of Mr. Andrew 
Carnegie, was built by Skin* ar. It is of the electro- 
pneumatic action type, and is played from a console 
of four keyboards. 



V 

IN MADISON HALL 

AT 11 o'clock Tuesday morning, the one 
-^^^ hundredth anniversary of Poe's birth, 
Dr. Charles W. Kent presided at commem- 
orative exercises held in Madison Hall, whose 
special purpose was to offer an opportunity 
for a study of Poe's influence beyond the 
limits of his own country. Dr. Kent ad- 
dressed the assemblage: 

We have assembled this morning for the 
purpose of doing further honor to the memory 
of Edgar Allan Poe. On Saturday evening 
the Jefferson Literary Society of which he was 
a member recalled his close connection with 
the student life of the University of Virginia 
by reviving the story of Poe's University resi- 
dence and his connection with our literary ac- 
tivities ; on Sunday evening some of us had the 
privilege of hearing from the distinguished 
clergyman who occupied our Chapel pulpit his 

34 



POE CENTENARY 35 

gracious and grateful tribute to Edgar Allan 
Poe and his plea for a right judgment of his 
failures and foibles. 

On last evening the Raven Society enter- 
tained us thoroughly by a unique celebration 
of Poe's interest as a man and gifts as an 
artist. 

While the University of Virginia lays claim 
to her distinguished son to whom, at all times, 
through good report and ill, she has been loyal 
and kindly, she recognizes that he cannot be 
confined within the narrow compass of her 
encircling care. When he passed from these 
walls into the outer world he committed him- 
self to the judgment, too often tardy and 
grudging, of his American countrymen. His 
recognition, however, has now past far beyond 
the limits of his University, his Southland, and 
even his entire country and his fame has ex- 
tended throughout all of the nations of Western 
Europe and even to the more remote lands of 
the Orient. In recognition of the universality 
of his fame and the cosmopolitanism of his 
literary genius we have chosen at this morning 
meeting to remind ourselves and you of his 
appreciation abroad. That this may be rightly 
set before you, we liave invited distinguished 



36 POE CENTENARY 

speakers representing other languages and 
other civiHzations and have great satisfaction 
in beheving that their testimony will convince 
even the most sceptical among you of the true 
worth and increasing fame of the University's 
most distinguished son. 

Dr. William Harrison Faulkner read letters 
from distinguished men in England, France 
and Germany. A letter from Richard Dehmel 
of Hamburg, a German poet of distinction, 
contained this tribute : — 

Von Entdeckungen und Abenteuern 
War des Herz Amerikas geschwellt. 
Da entlad es sich mit wilden Feuern, 
Und ein Dichter ward zum ungeheuern 
Krater einer innern neuen Welt — 

which Dr. James Taft Hatfield of North- 
western University instantly rendered into 
Enghsh and read, as follows: 

From its endless quest and eager faring 
Burned the new world's heart, too strained 
and tense: 
Forth it flamed, all older barriers tearing, 
And a poet came to be the daring 

Crater of his land's new wakened sense. 



POE CENTENARY 37 

Other poems contributed for the occasion were : 

Arthur Christopher Benson, Tremans, 
Horsted Keynes, Sussex: 

Edgar Allan Poe) 

Singer, whose song was as the ray- 
That doth the rifted cloudland part. 

Too rarely heard, the magic lay 

That flowed from thy o'er-brimming heart ! 

And if thy fantasy beguiled 

With darkest fears man's darker fate. 

Not as a laughter-loving child 
Thou didst thy soul interrogate. 

What stain of strife, what dust of fight 
Unequal, soiled that radiant brow? 

Made one with life, and truth, and light. 
Thou hast thy joyful answer now! 



38 POE CENTENARY 

Mr. John Boyd, Montreal, Canada: 

Wild child of genius with his witching lyre, 

Dreamer of dreams of rarest fantasy, 
Upon the earth he flashed with meteor fire, 

And in his wake rolled waves of melody. 
Seraphic songs as if from Heaven's choir. 

With elfin music, weird and mystical, 
Bewitching notes that golden thoughts inspire, 

Angelic strains, divinely musical. 
All praise be his on this his natal day, 

May all his faults and frailties be forgot. 
Lay laurels on his tomb and honors pay. 

Think only of the glory that he wrought. 
Hail, sister nation, for thy great son's sake, 

A kindred soul to Keats, and Burns, 
and Blake. 



POE CENTENARY 39 

Dr. Edward Dowden, Trinity College, 
Dublin: 

Seeker for Eldorado, magic land 

Whose gold is beauty, fine spun, amber 

clear, 
Over what moon-mountain, down what val- 
ley of fear. 
By what lone waters fringed with pallid sand 
Did thy foot falter? Say, what airs have 
fann'd 
Thy fevered brow, blown from no terrene 

sphere, 
What rustling wings, what echoes thrilled 
thine ear 
From mighty tombs whose brazen ports ex- 
pand? 

Seeker, who never quite attained, yet caught, 
Moulded and fashioned, as by strictest law, 
The rainbow's moon-mist and the flying 

gleam 
To mortal loveliness, for pity or for awe 
To us what carven dreams thy hand has 
brought. 
Dreams with the serried logic of a dream! 



40 POE CENTENARY 

Dr. Casar Flaischlen, Berlin: 

Lied des Lebens 

Friih am Morgen 

Sturm und Wolken, 

Sonne dann und blauer Himmel 

Mittag prachtig Hoh und Hag. 

Schmetterlinge, 
Bliihende Rosen 
Schwalbenlieder 
Finkenschlag 

Still nun wird es rings und stiller. 
Miide fallt am Mast die Fahne, 
Licht und Lust ist 
Am Erblassen. 

Schmetterling — und Lied — verlassen 

Liegen einsam 

Hoh und Hag. 

Und in Abend — 

Lautlos leiser 

Dammerung zerrinnt der Tag. 



POE CENTENARY 41 

The Chairman, Dr. Kent: 

In no country has Poe been so appreciated 
and so distinctly flattered by sincere imitation 
as in France. The development of the short- 
story, which has reached such a marked degree 
of excellence both in France and America, has 
its common starting point in Edgar Allan Poe. 
This influence was transmitted to France 
through the translations of Baudelaire, and 
from this day to ours the influence of Poe, 
both in poetry and prose, has been consciously 
felt by the artists of our sister republic. Un- 
able because of distance to summon to our aid 
a speaker from fair France, we have been 
singularly fortunate in procuring as her rep- 
resentative on this occasion Dr. Alcee Fortier 
of Tulane University, designated by one of 
his colleagues as our "Prince of Creoles." I 
have the honor to introduce Dr. Fortier who 
will speak to you in the language counted by 
him and his compatriots as la plus belle langiie 
du monde. 

Dr. Fortier : 

Je suis heureux de me trouver parmi vous 
aujourd'hui pour prendre part a la celebration 



42 POE CENTENARY 

du centenaire de la naissance d'Edgar Allan 
Poe. C'est ici meme que Ton doit celebrer cet 
evenement avec le plus d'eclat, a cette grande 
Universite de la Virginie, ou le celebre ecrivain 
commenga sa carriere litteraire. Ici vecut Poe, 
ici il fut etudiant, ici il fut inspire par I'atmos- 
phere vivifiante de la magnifique institution 
fondee par Jefferson, Le nom de I'auteur du 
"Corbeau," de "la Chute "de la Maison d'Usher" 
et autres histoires admirables, est indissoluble- 
ment lie a celui de I'Universite de la Virginie, 
et le nom de I'Universite a celui de Poe. 

L'etudiant doit une grande reconnaissance 
au college qui lui a donne la vie intellectuelle, 
mais le college, a son tour, ne doit pas oublier 
I'ancien eleve qui, par son genie, a contribue 
a illustrer son alma mater. Je sais bien que 
cette Universite serait arrivee a la celebrite 
sans I'aide d'Edgar Poe, mais celui-ci a grande- 
ment ajoute a la gloire de I'institution, et il est 
eminemment juste qu'elle se souvienne du poete 
et qu'elle I'honore. En agissant ainsi I'Uni- 
versite represente aussi le grand etat de la 
Virginie qu' aimait tant Poe, et dont I'ad- 
mirable civilisation exerga sur lui une si grande 
influence que, malgre ses egarements, il lui 



POE CENTENARY 43 

resta toujours dans I'ame I'amour du beau et 
du vrai. 

Nous ne pouvons admettre qu'un homme 
soit jamais vraiment grand, s'il lui manque la 
grandeur morale, et une institution d'enseigne- 
ment superieur ne donnera pas cet homme en 
exemple, quelque vaste que soit son genie. 
Edgar Poe fut plus malheureux que coupa- 
ble, et nous qui admirons ses belles qualites 
mentales, lui pardonnons ses fautes, parce 
qu'il aima I'art, parce qu'il ne ternit jamais un 
nom de femme dans ses vers ni dans sa prose, 
et parce qu'il etudia I'ame humaine et tacha 
d'en comprendre les mysteres. Telle est I'opin- 
ion qu'ont de lui les professeurs de I'Univer- 
site de la Virginie, qui ont fait une etude ap- 
profondie de ses oeuvres litteraires et de sa 
vie malheureuse. Telle est I'opinion de M. 
le Docteur James A. Harrison, qui a ecrit la 
biographie la plus complete et la plus sym- 
pathique du poete; telle est I'opinion de M. 
le Docteur Charles W. Kent, qui a si bien com- 
pris le genie de Poe; telle est I'opinion enfin 
de I'eminent President de cette Universite, dont 
le gout litteraire est si fin et si parfait. C'est 
. parce que ces messieurs savent qu'Edgar Poe 



44 POE CENTENARY 

ne fut pas le miserable, que nous presente une 
deplorable legende, qu'ils honorent au- 
jourd'hui sa memoire et nous ont invites a 
I'honorer avec eux. 

L'Universite de la Virginie est fiere du plus 
illustre homme de lettres parmi ses anciens 
eleves, elle lui sait gre de la gloire qu'il a don- 
nee a elle, a I'etat de la Virginie, et aux Etats- 
Unis. Pendant de longues annees, apres que 
notre pays eut acquis son independance, il 
n'etait connu en Europe que par ses institu- 
tions politiques, et par son merveilleux devel- 
oppement industriel et commercial. A peine 
quelques noms d'ecrivains avaient traverse 
rOcean et etaient mentionnes de temps en 
temps, mais lorsque le Corbeau de Poe eut 
croasse son immortelle complainte, que le 
Scarabee d'Or eut scintille dans la nuit, et qu' 
eurent paru les formes etherees de Morella et 
de Ligeia, on sut dans la vieille Europe que 
la jeune republique occidentale avait donne 
naissance a un vrai poete, a un prosateur ex- 
quis. De tons les ecrivains americains Edgar 
Poe est le plus connu en Europe. II est le 
seul qui fasse, pour ainsi dire, partie de la lit- 
terature frangaise, qui soit reellement fran- 



POE CENTENARY 45 

cise, comme I'a si bien dit Emile Hennequin. 
Voyons done quelle est la genese de cette ex- 
traordinaire popularite. 

Des 1841, peu apres la publication du 
"Double Assassinat dans la Rue Morgue," 
M. le Docteur James A. Harrison nous dit que 
trois journaux de Paris s'approprierent et se 
disputerent ce conte etrange de ratiocination. 
Ce qui commenga, cependant, la reputation de 
Poe en France fut un article de E. D. Forgues, 
publie dans "la Revue des Deux Mondes" du 
15 octobre, 1846, "les Contes d'Edgar A. 
Poe." M. Forgues commence son article par 
une comparaison entre "I'Essai Philosophique 
sur les Probabilites" de Laplace et le systeme 
de Poe. II dit que les contes de I'auteur amer- 
icain ont une parente evidente avec la philoso- 
phic de Laplace, quoiqu' ils ne conduisent pas 
a un aussi noble but et n'emanent pas d'une 
pensee aussi vigoureuse. La faculte inspira- 
trice de Poe, c'est le raisonnement ; sa muse, 
c'est la logique, son moyen d agir sur les lect- 
eurs, c'est le doute. "L'auteur met aux prises 
Oedipe et le sphinx, le heros et un logogriphe." 
Le mystere parait impenetrable, I'intelligence 
s'irrite contre le voile etendu devant elle, mais 



46 POE CENTENARY 

sort victorieuse de la lutte apres des travaux 
extraordinaires. 

"Monos et Una," d'apres M. Forgues, est 
une monographie patiente, methodique, sci- 
entifique, sur la fraternite du sommeil et de 
la mort. La logique de Poe ne devie que rare- 
ment les principes une fois poses; elle est 
claire et intelligible, et s'empare du lecteur 
malgre lui. C'est sans nul doute, a mon avis, 
cette logique impeccable, cette clarte, malgre 
I'obscurite apparente, que Ton trouve dans les 
contes de Poe, qui le rendirent si populaire 
en France, car ce sont les traits caracteristiques 
de I'esprit frangais. Les grands ecrivains de 
la France reconnurent en Poe une affinite lit- 
teraire et lui donnerent droit de cite parmi eux. 

M. Forgues ne se contente pas, cependant, 
de presenter le logicien a ses compatriotes ; il 
veut aussi leur faire voir le poete, I'inventeur 
de fantaisies sans but, et il fait I'analyse du 
"Chat Noir" et de "rHomme des Foules." II 
prefere les quelques pages de certains contes 
de Poe a de longs volumes, et comprend le 
merite du conte, ce genre ou Ton "condense," 
dit-il, "en peu de mots sous forme de recit, 
toute une theorie abstraite, tous les elements 



POE CENTENARY 47 

d'une composition originale." M. Forgues ne 
veut pas etablir un parallele en regie entre 
I'auteur americain et les feuilletonistes mod- 
ernes, mais, dit-il, "il sera opportun et utile 
de les comparer quand le temps aura conso- 
lide la reputation naissante du conteur etran- 
ger, et — qui sait? — ebranle quelque peu celle 
de nos romanciers feconds." Le critique fran- 
gais de 1846 etait prophete: les nombreux 
volumes d'Alexandre Dumas, quoiqu'ils in- 
teressent encore les jeunes gens de vingt ans, 
ne font presque plus partie de la litterature, 
tandis que les contes de Poe sont des joyaux 
litteraires, dont I'eclat augmente ; a mesure que 
s'ecoulent les annees. 

L'article de M. Forgues attira I'attention de 
Mme. Gabrielle Meunier, qui traduisit quel- 
ques-uns des contes de Poe. Ce grand 
ecrivain, neanmoins, serait reste presque in- 
connu en France, s'il n'avait trouve en Charles 
Baudelaire une affinite litteraire extraordinaire 
et un traducteur merveilleux. On n'avait rien 
vu de pareil en France aux contes de Poe, 
malgre la concision et la clarte caracteris- 
tiques du style frangais, si ce n'etait "la Venus 
d'lUe" de Merimee, publiee en 1837. Aussi la 



48 POE CENTENARY 

traduction de Baudelaire en 1848, et ensuite en 
1856, des "Histoires Extraordinaires" eut-elle 
un immense succes. Le traducteur consacra 
a I'auteur americain une notice sympathique et 
eclairee, et quoiqu'il n'eut pas les documents 
qui exonerent le poete des calomnies de Gris- 
wold il le defend contre son biographe 
malveillant. II dit qu'Edgar Poe et sa patrie 
n'etaient pas de niveau, et il ajoute que Poe 
avait "une delicatesse exquise de sens qu'une 
note fausse torturait, une finesse de goiit que 
tout excepte I'exacte proportion, revoltait, un 
amour insatiable du Beau, qui avait pris la 
puissance d'une passion morbide." II etait 
certainement impossible que Poe piit etre bien 
compris par ses compatriotes de la premiere 
moitie du XIX^ siecle. 

Baudelaire raconte la vie de Poe, nous 
presente son portrait physique et moral et fait 
de lui un magnifique eloge que nous citons tout 
(Cntier. "Ce n'est pas par ses miracles 
materiels, qui pourtant ont fait sa renommee 
qu'il lui sera donne de conquerir I'admiration 
des gens qui pensent, c'est par son amour du 
Beau, par sa connaissance des conditions har- 
moniques de la beaute, par sa poesie profonde 



POE CENTENARY 49 

et plaintive, ouvragee neanmoins, transparente 
et correcte comme im bijou de cristal — par son 
admirable style, pur et bizarre, — serre comme 
les mailles d'une Armure, — complaisant et 
minutieux, — et dont la plus legere intention 
sert a pousser doucement le lecteur vers un but 
voulu, — et enfin surtout par ce genie tout 
special, par ce temperament unique qui lui a 
permis de peindre et d'expliquer, d'une 
maniere impeccable, saisissante, I'exception 
dans I'ordre moral. — Diderot, pour prendre un 
exemple entre cent, est un auteur sanguin ; Poe 
est I'ecrivain des nerfs, et meme de quelque 
chose de plus, — et le meilleur que je con- 
naisse." "Quelquefois, des echappees mag- 
nifiques, gorgees de lumieres et de couleur, 
s'ouvrent soudainement dans ses paysages, et 
Ton voit apparaitre au fond de leurs horizons 
des villes orientales et des architectures, 
vaporisees par la distance, ou le soleil jette des 
pluies d'or." 

Dans cette appreciation de son auteur favori 
Baudelaire s'eleve a la hauteur de son modele 
comme prosateur, et nous verrons bientot 
qu'il I'egale presque comme poete. Je ne sais 
reellement si I'Edgar Poe frangais n'est pas 



50 POE CENTENARY 

superieur au Poe de langne anglaise. Ecoutez 
I'admirable traduction de Baudelaire : 

"Les annees, les annees peuvent passer mais 
le souvenir de cet instant — jamais ! Ah ! les 
fleurs et la vigne n'etaient pas choses incon- 
nues pour moi — mais I'aconit et le cypres 
m'ombragerent nuit et jour. Et je perdis tout 
sentiment du temps et des lieux, et les etoiles 
de ma destinee disparurent du ciel, et des lors 
la terre devint tenebreuse, et toutes les figures 
terrestres passerent pres de moi comme des 
ombres voltigeantes, et parmi elles je n'en 
voyais qu'une — Morella! Les vents du firma- 
ments ne soupiraient qu'un son a mes oreilles, 
et le clapotement de la mer murmurait in- 
cessamment ; 'Morella !' Mais elle mourut, et de 
mes propres mains je la portai a sa tombe, et 
je ris d'un amer et long rire, quand, dans le 
caveau ou je deposai la seconde, je ne 
decouvris aucune trace de la premiere — 
Morella." 

En 1857 Baudelaire publia "les Nouvelles 
Histoires Extraordinaires ;" en 1858, "les 
Aventures d' Arthur Gordon Pym;" en 1864, 
"Eureka," et en 1865, "les Histoires 
Grotesques et Serieuses." Ces traductions 



POE CENTENARY 51 

sont dignes des premieres et naturaliserent en 
France les contes et les nouvelles de Poe. 
"Les Petits Poemes en Prose" de Baudelaire 
furent, sans nul doute, comme beaucoup de 
ses vers, inspires par Poe. On y voit des 
etudes etranges et I'amour de I'art, mais on 
voit souvent aussi dans la prose et dans les vers 
de Baudelaire, des grossieretes de langage et 
des impuretes de pensee qu'on ne trouve jamais 
dans Poe. On ne pent, cependant, qu' admirer 
"I'Etranger," a la premiere page des "Petits 
Poemes en Prose." On y trouve le sentiment 
poetique de Poe: 

"Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme enigma- 
tique, dis? ton pere, ta mere, ta soeur ou ton 
frere?" 

"Je n'ai ni pere, ni mere, ni soeur, ni frere." 

"Les amis?" 

"Vous vous servez la d'une parole dont le 
sens m'est reste jusqu'a ce jour inconnu." 

"Ta patrie?" 

"J 'ignore sous quelle latitude elle est 
situee." 

"La beaute?" 

"Je I'aimerais volontiers, deesse et im- 
mortelle." 



52 POE CENTENARY 

"Vor?" 

"Je le hais comme vous haissez Dieu." 

"Eh! qu'aimes-tu done, extraordinaire 
etranger ?" 

"J'aime les nuages — les nuages qui passent 
....la bas....les merveilleux nuages!" 

"Le Vieux Saltimbanque" est un portrait 
tel qu'aurait pu le dessiner Poe, un portrait 
implacable de verite, ou cependant la sympathie 
pour les vaincus de la vie se mele au senti- 
ment d'horreur que fait eprouver la vue 
d'un vieil homme voute, caduc, decrepit. 
Nous reviendrons a I'influence de Poe sur 
Baudelaire poete. Poe le prosateur attira 
I'attention de Barbey d'Aurevilly, et cet 
etrange ecrivain consacra a I'auteur americain 
plusieurs articles, entre 1853 et 1883. II ne 
lui est pas aussi sympathique que Baudelaire, 
mais il reconnait sa volonte extraordinaire, 
et I'appelle "le plus energique des artistes 
volontaires." II dit que Poe "se sert d'une 
analyse inouie et qu'il pousse a la fatigue 
supreme, a I'aide d'on ne sait quel prodigieux 
miscroscope sur la pulpe meme du cerveau." 
.... "Positivement le lecteur assiste a 
I'operation du chirurgien; positivement, il 



POE CENTENARY 53 

entend crier I'acier de rinstrument et sent 
les douleurs." 

Barbey d'Aurevilly lie connut d'abord 
Poe que par sa biographie par Baudelaire. 
II le jugea moins severement, lorsqu'il eut 
lu la vie que joignit Emile Hennequin a sa 
traduction des "Contes Grotesques." II lui 
donna alors "la Royaute des hommes de 
genie malheureux." 

Revenons maintenant a Baudelaire et a 
Poe, et voyons ce que Theophile Gautier a 
dit d'eux. Nous ne doutons aucunement 
que Poe n'ait eu une certaine influence sur 
Gautier, le poete de "I'art pour I'art," et sur 
son ecole. II est probable que les contes de 
Poe ont inspire "la Morte Amoureuse," 
"le Roman de la Momie," et "Spirite." 
Baudelaire avait dedie ses extraordinaires 
"Fleurs du Mai" a Gautier, et celui-ci ecrivit 
une notice sur I'auteur du livre dans laquelle 
il fit une fine analyse du genie de Baudelaire 
et de celui de Poe. II dit qu'au-dessus de 
rimmonde fourmillement de misere, delai- 
deur et de perversite que presentent souvent 
"les Fleurs du Mai," "loin, bien loin dans I'in- 
alterable azur, flotte Tadmirable fantome de 



54 POE CENTENARY 

la Beatrix, I'ideal toujours desire, jamais 
atteint, la beaute superieure et divine incarnee 
sous line forme de femme etheree, spiritualisee, 
faite de lumiere, de flamme et de parfum, une 
vapeur, un reve, un reflet du monde aromal 
et seraphique comme les Ligeia, les Morella, 
les Una, les Eleonore d'Edgar Poe et la Sera- 
phita-Seraphitus de Balzac, cette etonnante 
creation." 

Gautier appelle Poe "un singulier genie 
d'une individualite si rare, si tranchee, si ex- 
ceptionnelle." II dit qu'en France le nom de 
Baudelaire est inseparable de celui de Poe, et 
que le souvenir de I'un eveille immediatement 
la pensee de I'autre. "II semble meme par- 
fois," ajoute-t-il, "que les idees de I'Ameri- 
cain appartiennent en propre au Frangais." 
Une des histoires les plus fortes de Poe est 
"le Chat Noir," qui nous terrific, lorsqu'il ap- 
parait "avec sa gueule rouge et son oeil unique 
flamboyant." Baudelaire ecrivit trois poemes 
sur les chats et dit d'eux: 

lis prennent en songeant les nobles attitudes 
Des grands sphinx allonges au fond des soli- 
tudes, 
Qui semblent s'endormir dans un reve sans fin ; 



POE CENTENARY 55 

Ijeurs reins feconds sont pleins d'etincelles 

magiques, 
Et des parcelles d'or ainsi qu'un sable fin, 
Etoilent vaguement leurs prunelles mystiques. 

On voit Edgar Poe dans les plus beaux 
poemes de Baudelaire, dans "Don Juan aux 
Enfers," dans "les Petites Vieilles," dans "le 
Soleil," et surtout dans, "le Mort Joyeux," 
qui n'est qu'une autre forme du "Ver Con- 
querant," de Poe, et que nous citerons en 
entier, malgre I'horreur du sujet, pour faire 
voir I'affinite litteraire et mentale vraiment 
extraordinaire des deux poetes. 

Dans une terre grasse et pleine d'escargots 
Je veux creuser moi-meme une fosse pro- 
fonde, 
Oti je puisse a loisir etaler mer vieux os 
Et dormir dans I'oubli comme un requin 
dans I'onde. 

Je hais les testaments et je hais les tombeaux; 

Plutot que d'implorer une larme du monde, 
Vivant, j'aimerais mieux inviter les corbeaux 

A saigner tons les bouts de ma carcasse 
immonde. 



56 POE CENTENARY 

O vers! noirs compagnons sans oreille et sans 

yeux, 
Voyez venir a vous nn mort libre et joyeux! 
Philosophes viveurs, fils de la pourriture. 

A travers ma mine allez done sans remords, 
Et dites-moi s'il est encore qiielqiie torture 
Pour ce yieux corps sans ame et mort parmi 
les morts! 

"William Wilson," ou Edgar Poe se de- 
double d'une maniere si etonnante, a dii plaire 
infiniment a Baudelaire, ainsi que I'admirable 
"Chute de la Maison d'Usher," oil le senti- 
ment de la terreur est si intense. Baudelaire 
a du rever bien souvent a Eleonora, qu'il eut 
voulu suivre dans la vallee du Gazon Diapre, 
ou "les fleurs etoilees s'etaient abimees dans 
le tronc des arbres; ou avaient deperi les 
asphodeles d'un rouge de rubis," qu'avaient 
remplacees "les sombres violettes, semblables a 
des yeux qui se convulsaient peniblement et 
regorgeaient toujours de larmes de rosee;" d'ou 
"le volumineux nuage retombe dans les regions 
d' Hesperus avait emporte le spectacle infini 
de sa pourpre et de sa magnificence." Ces 



POE CENTENARY 57 

admirables phrases de Poe sont rendues en 
franqais par son traducteur avec une exacti- 
tude saisissante, un sens poetique extraordi- 
naire. 

L'influence de Poe le conteur se fait voir 
dans Villiers de I'lsle Adam, Paul Hervieu, 
Henri de Regnier; dans Guy de Maupassant, 
qui I'egale dans "le Horla" et autres oeuvres 
d'un realisme intense; dans Jules Verne, qui 
imite ses romans scientifiques, comme "Hans 
Pfaal," ou ses aventures de voyage, comme 
"Gordon Pym," dans Gaboriau, dont le M. 
Lecoq est frere de Legrand et de Dupin; dans 
Jean Richepin, dont "les Morts Bizarres," 
sont imitees directement des contes de Poe, 
ou celui-ci fait une etude si extraordinaire et 
si poignante de la mort. "Le Disseque" de 
Richepin nous rapelle "le Cas de M. Wald- 
emar," et Feru, I'etudiant en medecine, nous 
interesse presque autant que les personnages 
les plus sombres de Poe. II veut prendre la 
matiere en flagrant debt de pensee. "II suffi- 
rait d'arriver a ceci," dit Feru, "analyser, dis- 
sequer, tenir sous ses doigts un cerveau pen- 
sant. Evidemment on saisirait la pensee, 
on la sentirait, on la toucherait, comme on 



58 POE CENTENARY 

saisit, comme on sent, comme on touche un 
phenomene electrique, par exemple." Pour 
esperer une telle possibilite, Feru veut dis- 
sequer des hommes vivants. II tuerait des 
hommes pour le bien des hommes. A la fin 
de la Commune, dans la cuisine de la cremerie 
borgne, '*le Rendez-vous des Affames," un 
corps tombe a travers une marquise en verre. 
C'est Feru, I'etudiant en medecine. On se 
baisse pour le relever, mais on est saisi par 
une epouvantable horreur, "le malheureux 
avait la poitrine depouillee, les chairs a vif, et 
cela non pas par I'effet du verre, mais par 
suite d'une operation. II etait disseque." II 
s'etait disseque, veut dire I'auteur. 

Le ler mai 1886 "la Revue des Deux Mon- 
des" publia un article tres interessant sur "les 
Poetes Americains," par Th. Bentzon (Mme. 
Blanc), qui visita les Etats-Unis il y a quel- 
ques annees, et fit un sympathique portrait de 
la femme americaine. Mme. Blanc dit que 
Poe "restera inimitable, quelque effort que 
fassent pour approcher de lui les exploiteurs 
du macabre grotesque ou larmoyant," Elle 
dit que le poete americain adorait le beau 
comme Heine et "qu'il voyait sa supreme ex- 



POE CENTENARY 59 

pression dans la tristesse que nous cause le mal 
de la vie et notre incapacite a saisir I'inconnu." 

Mentionnons encore d'autres articles pub- 
lies dans "la Revue des Deux Mondes :" Un 
par T. de Wyzewa, le 15 octobre 1894, et deux 
en 1897 par Arvede Barine (Mme. Georges 
Vincens). M. de Wyzewa dit des vers de 
Poe : "lis sont les plus magnifiques, a mon 
gre, de tous ceux qui existent dans la langue 
anglaise. Ce sont des chefs-d'oeuvre d'emo- 
tion et de musique : a eux seuls, ils suffiraient 
pour la gloire d'un ecrivain." M. de Wyzewa 
ajoute qu'il "a inaugure en outre une dizaine 
au moins de genres litteraires tout autres, dont 
chacun a ete ensuite largement exploite." 

Les articles d' Arvede Barine ont pour titre, 
"Essais de Litterature Pathologique." Ils ne 
nous plaisent pas autant que le livre de M. 
Emile Lauvriere, public en 1904, "Edgar Poe, 
sa vie et son Oeuvre, Etude de Psychologic 
Pathologique." Voila I'ouvrage le plus com- 
plet sur Poe qui ait paru en France. L'auteur 
consacre 730 pages a son sujet et le traite 
a fond. II donne la vie du grand poete 
americain, reconnait ses fautes, les excuse, 
jusqu'a un certain point, et le plaint. II 



60 POE CENTENARY 

etudie de la maniere la plus detaillee les oeuvres 
du poete et du prosateur, et nous pouvons dire 
que son analyse du "Corbeau" est la plus 
penetrante que nous ayons lue : le Corbeau, 
c'est Poe lui-meme; Lenore, c'est encore lui. 
"II y a done," dit le critique frangais, "dans 
le puissant symbolisme de ce petit drame 
pathetique, toute I'ame du poete: c'est son 
etre conscient aux prises avec son ideal ex- 
tatique et avec sa melancolie desesperee. Le 
volume de 1845, adjoute M. Lauvriere, con- 
tient assez de chefs-d'oeuvre pour immotaliser 
un nom. "II n'a pas seulement 'le Corbeau' 
qui, malgre des raffinements d'art qui touchent 
a I'artifice, restera par la solidite de son fond 
comme pour la vigueur de ses effets, par la 
prestigieuse magie de sa musique comme par 
le poignant pathetique de son desespoir, la 
plus puissante et, partant, la plus populaire des 
oeuvres de Poe, un vrai chef-d'oeuvre de 
poesie fantastique, sans egal en beaucoup de 
langues et avec lequel ne pent rivaliser dans la 
poesi anglaise c|ue le charme moins con- 
querant, mais plus insinuant du "Vieux Marin" 
de Coleridge. 

M. Lauvriere etudie en Poe conteur, le fan- 



POE CENTENARY 61 

tastique, la peur, I'impulsion, la curiosite 
r imagination, la logique et le style, et fait un 
travail vraiment magistral. Poe critique, Poe 
cosmogoniste, nous interessent moins que Poe 
poete et Poe conteur, mais je le repete, le livre 
de M. Lauvriere est remarquable. II est ecrit 
avec une clarte bien frangaise, avec une exac- 
titude toute scientifique, et d'un style, parfois 
simple, parfois fort, et parfois poetique comme 
les vers memes de I'auteur du "Corbeau." 

De nombreux volumes ont ete publics en 
France sur Edgar Poe, et ses oeuvres ont ete 
traduites maintes fois en frangais. Parmi ces 
traductions, outre celles de Baudelaire, nous 
pouvons mentionner les poemes traduits par 
Stephane Mallarme, et "le Scarabee d'Or," par 
J. H. Rosny. C'est, neanmoins, Baudelaire, 
comme nous I'avons dit, qui naturalisa Poe en 
France. Son admiration fut telle qu'il fut 
possede de son auteur favori, et Asselineau, 
cite par M. Lauvriere, nous dit "qu' a tout 
venant, ou qu'il se trouvat, dans la rue, au 
cafe, dans une imprimerie, le matin, le soir, il 
allait demandant : 'Connaissez-vous Edgar 
Poe,' et selon la reponse, il epanchait son 
enthousiasme ou pressait de questions son 



62 POE CENTENARY 

auditeur. Jules Lemaitre, lui-meme, le 
celebre ecrivain, dans un "Dialogue des 
Morts," a place Poe en compagnie de Shake- 
speare et de Platon, quoiqu'il disc qu'ils pre- 
sentent trois exemplaires de I'espece humaine 
aussi dissemblables que possible. 

Nous avons donne I'opinion des critiques 
frangais sur Edgar Poe; nous allons main- 
tenant etudier brievement quelle fut son in- 
fluence sur la poesie frangaise. Nous nous 
servirons pour ce petit travail de I'excellente 
"Anthologie des Poetes Frangais Contempo- 
rains," de M. G. Walch, publiee en 1906. 
Nous avons deja compare Poe poete a Baude- 
laire poete, et nous avons vu V influence de 
I'Americain sur le Frangais. Quant aux autres 
poetes inspires par Poe, ils le furent, en gen- 
eral, indirectement et principalement par I'en- 
tremise de Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, 
peut-etre, le seul excepte. Baudelaire repeta le 
precepte de Poe que la poesie n'a d'autre objet 
qu'elle-meme. C'est la doctrine de "I'art pour 
I'art" de Theophile Gautier, et nous la voyons 
portee a un haut point de perfection par The- 
odore de Banville, qui avait, disait-on, "pour 
ame la poesie meme." 



POE CENTENARY 63 

Barbey d'Aurevilly est de I'ecole de Poe, 
ainsi que Villiers de I'lsle Adam et Verlaine, 
cet etonnant boheme, que M. Anatole France 
compare a Villon, le grand poete du XV® 
siecle. Verlaine a meme un poeme intitule 
"Nevermore" que nous citons ici comme un 
souvenir interessant du "Corbeau :" 

Ne^vErmore ! 

Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu? L'au- 

tomne 
Faisait voler la grive a travers I'air atone 
Et le soleil dardait un rayon monotone 
Sur le bois jaunissant ou la bise detone. 

Nous etions seul a seule et marchions en re- 

vant, 
Elle et moi, les cheveux et la pensee au vent, 
Soudain, tournant vers moi son regard emou- 

vant: 
"Quel fut ton plus beau jour?" fit sa voix 

d'or vivant, 

Sa voix douce et sonore, au frais timbre ange- 

lique. 
Un sourire discret lui donna la replique, 
Et je baisai sa main blanche, devotement. 



64 POE CENTENARY 

Ah ! les premieres fleiirs, qu'elles sont par- 

f umees ! 
Et qu'il bruit avec un murmure charmant 
Le premier "oui" qui sort de levres bien- 

aimees ! 

Chez plusieurs des Parnassiens de la pre- 
miere heure, tels que Xavier de Ricard, Leon 
Dierx, Catulle Mendes, ainsi que chez plusieurs 
ecrivains des deux autres Parnasses, on voit 
I'influence de Poe. Le Parnasse fut une reac- 
tion contre le romantisme, et fut suivi par le 
symbolisme, qu'on a parfois appele "le deca- 
dent." Arthur Rimbaud, I'auteur du curieux 
"Sonnet des Voyelles," fut un des precurseurs 
du symbolisme. Henri de Regnier en fut le 
chef inconteste, et subit, sans aucun doute, 1' 
influence de notre poete americain. Lisons 
surtout I'admirable sonnet, "la Terre Doul- 
oureuse a bu le Sang des Reves :" 

La terre douloureuse a bu le sang des Reves, 
Le vol evanoui des ailes a passe, 
Et le flux de la Mer a, ce soir, efface 

Le mystere des pas sur le sable des greves. 



POE CENTENARY 65 

Au delta clebordant son onde de massacre 
Pierre a pierre ont croule le temple et la cite, 
Et sous le flot rayonne un eclair irrite 

D'or barbare frisant an front d'un simulacre. 

Vers la foret nefaste vibre un cri de mort; 
Dans I'ombre ou son passage a hurle gronde 
encor 
La disparition d'une horde farouche; 

Et le masque muet du Sphinx ou nul n'ex- 

plique 
L'enigme qui crispait la ligne de sa bouche, 
Rit dans la pourpre en sang de ce coucher 

tragique. 

Stephane Mallarme, acclame le Maitre par 
beaucoup de jeunes poetes, fut selon I'expres- 
sion d'un critique, "impregne" d'Edgar Poe. 
Jean Richepin poete nous rappelle I'auteur du 
"Corbeau," ainsi que Rene Ghil, Edmond Har- 
aucourt, Gustave Kahn, Jules Laforgue, 
Gregoire Le Roy, Adolphe Rette, Maurice 
Rollinat, I'auteur des "Nevroses," parmi beau- 
coup d'autres poetes contemporains. Men- 
tionnons, cependant, d'une maniere toute spe- 
ciale, deux grands ecrivains beiges, Maurice 



66 POE CENTENARY 

Maeterlinck, dont on a dit: 'Toe, le Poe de 
la 'Maison Usher,' est a coup sur, son maitre 
familier;" et Emile Verhaeren. Appelons 
encore I'attention sur deux celebres poetes 
frangais, nes aux Etats-Unis : Stuart Merrill, 
a Long Island, et Francis Viele-Griffin, ne 
a Norfolk, en Virginie. Le petit poeme de 
celui-ci, "Fleurs du Chemin," est charmant et 
est un exemple de la "volonte" de Poe : 

Crois, Vie ou Mort, que t'importe, 

En I'eblouissement d'amour? 
Prie en ton ame forte: 

Que t'importe nuit ou jour? 
Car tu sauras des reves vastes 

Si tu sais I'unique loi : 
// n'est pas de niiit sous les astres 

Bt toute I'ombre est en toi. 

Aime, Honte ou Gloire, qu'importe, 

A toi, dont voici le tour? 
Chante de ta voix qui porte 

Le message de tout amour? 
Car tu diras le chant des fastes 

Si tu dis ton intime emoi : 
// n'est pas de fatals desastres, 

Toute la defaite est en toi. 



POE CENTENARY 67 

Quant a Stuart Merrill ses "Poings a la 
Porte" nous interessent presque autant que 
"le Corbeau." Le refrain: "Entends-tu tous 
ces poings qui frappent a la porte?" nous im- 
pressionne tout autant que le "nevermore" de 
Poe : Ce sont peut-etre des amis qui frappent, 
mais le poete n'ouvre pas a la joie futile, lui 
qui veille seul parmi les esclaves du sommeil; 
ce sont peut-etre des vagabonds, rodant de 
male sorte, pieds nus dans leurs sabots, cou- 
teau clair au poing. 

lis viennent quemander, quand le soleil est loin. 
La miche de pain rassis et le pichet de vin sur 
A la femme furtive et au vieillard lourd 
Qui ecoutent, sans oser crier au secours, 
Leur haleine qui souffle au trou de la serrure. 
Si ce sont eux je rallumerai la lampe du foyer 
Pour que s'y chauffent les pauvres que per- 
sonne n'a choyes. 

C'est peut-etre Celui qui vient vetu de blanc, 
et quit fait dans la nuit le geste immense du 
pardon. Le poete alors prendra le baton de 
voyage et suivra le Redempteur vers des 



68 POE CENTENARY 

destinees meilleures. "Entends-tu tous ces 
poings qui frappent a la porte?" 

Je ne sais si Ton ne pourrait dire qu'Edmond 
Rostand lui-meme n'a pas pense parfois a Poe, 
lorsqu'il ecrivait son fier "Cyrano," ou Ton 
voit un tel culte pour I'ideal, pour la beaute 
artistique, malgre le physique grotesque du 
heros. Xavier Privas, Albert Samain, Carnille 
Mauclair, Charles Morice, Leo Larquier, 
doivent beaucoup a Baudelaire et a Mallarme 
et, par consequent, a Poe. Paul Fort a cer- 
tainement imite notre poete dans sa ballade, 
"Cette Fille, elle est morte," ou nous voyons 
le repetend si cher a Poe, la repetition et le 
parallelisme si bien decrits par M. le Dr. C. 
Alphonso Smith: 

Cette fille, elle est morte, est morte dans ses 
amours, 
lis I'ont portee en terre, en terre au point du 
jour, 
lis I'ont couchee toute seule, toute seule en ses 
atours. 
lis sont rev' nus gaiment; gaiment avec le 

jour 
lis ont chante gaiment, gaiment: Chacun 
son tour. 



POE CENTENARY 69 

Cette fille, elle est morte, est morte dans ses 

amours. 
lis sont alles aux champs, aux champs comme 

tous les jours. 

Georges Marlow, Beige comme Maeterlinck 
et Verhaeren, a donne de la poesie une defini- 
tion que n'eiit pas desavouee Poe: "La 
poesie? Un peu de fumee c[ui s'eleve de I'ame 
embrasee et qui parfois, entremelee de rayons 
d'etoile, se concrete en aureole autour de I'ame 
qui s'eteint." 

Terminons nos citations des poetes frangais 
par le sonnet de Mallarme : 

Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe 
Tel qu'en Lui-meme enfin I'eternite le change, 
Le Poete suscite avec un glaive nu 
Son siecle epouvante de n'avoir pas connu 
Que la mort triomphait dans cette voix 
etrange ! 

Eux, comme un vil sursaut d'hydre oyant jadis 
I'ange 
Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la 
tribu, 



70 POE CENTENARY 

Proclamerent tres haut du sortilege bu 
Dans le flot sans honneur de quelque noir 
melange. 

Du sol et de la nue hostiles, 6 grief! 

Si notre idee avec ne sculpte un bas-relief 
Dont la tombe de Poe eblouissante s'orne, 

Calme bloc ici-bas chu d'un desastre obscur, 
Que ce granit du moins montre a jamais sa 

borne 
Aux noirs vols du Blaspheme epars dans le 

futur. 

Les vers frangais, inspires par notre grand 
poete, sont generalement fort beaux, mais je 
doute qu'ils egalent le merveilleux "Corbeau," 
meme traduit en prose, tel que nous le lisons 
dans le livre de M. Lauvriere. ' Quelle fin ad- 
mirable du poeme, que les lignes suivantes; 

Prophete! dis-je, etre de malheur! oiseau 
ou demon, tou jours prophete. 
Par le ciel qui se deploie au-dessus de nos 
tetes, par ce Dieu que tous deux nous 
adorons, 



POE CENTENARY 71 

Dis a cette ame de chagrin chargee si dans 

I'Eden lointain, 
Elle doit etreindre une vierge sainte que les 

anges nomment Lenore, 
Etreindre une rare et radieuse vierge que les 

anges nomment Lenore. 

Le Corbeau dit: "J^^iais plus." 

Que cette parole soit le signal de notre sep- 
aration, oiseau ou demon! hurlai-je en 
me dressant, 

Rentre dans la tempete, retourne au rivage 
plutonien de la nuit; 

Ne laisse pas de plume noire en gage du men- 
songe qu'a profere ton ame; 

Laisse inviolee ma solitude! quitte ce buste 
au-dessus de ma porte! 
Le Corbeau dit : "J^^^^is plus !" 

Mais le Corbeau, sans broncher, siege encore, 

siege toujours, 
Sur le pale buste de Pallas juste au-dessus de 

la porte de ma chambre, 
Et ses yeux ont toute la semblance de ceux 

d'un demon qui reve, 



72 POE CENTENARY 

Et la lueur de la lampe misselant sur lui, 
projette son ombre sur le plancher, 

Et mon ame, hors de cette ombre qui git, 
flottante, sur le plancher, 
Ne s'elevera plus ! 

Je remercie les membres du Comite du Cen- 
tenaire qui m'ont fait I'honneur de m'inviter 
a parler ici en frangais. Je vous remercie, 
mesdames et messieurs, de votre bienveillante 
attention. Cela me fait le plus grand plaisir 
de me retrouver ici, a cette Universite, ou, 
comme Poe, j'ai ete moi-meme etudiant. Mon 
sejour ici a ete bien court, mais il a laisse sur 
mon esprit et sur mon ame des traces ineffaga- 
bles. Je puis dire de mes annees de jeunesse: 
"Jamais plus," mais le souvenir c|ue j'ai con- 
serve de rUniversite de la Virginie est aussi 
immuable que le "Corbeau qui, sans broncher, 
siege encore, siege tou jours sur le pale buste 
de Pallas." 



POE CENTENARY 73 

The Chairman, Dr. Kent: 

Within recent years much attention has been 
given to the influence of Hoffman on Edgar 
Allan Poe, and the reciprocal influence of Poe 
on the German writers of imaginative prose 
and more especially upon the modern school 
of German poets. We were very fortunate 
in finding in our own country a talented young 
German fresh from the companionship ot 
these modern poets and thoroughly in touch 
with the present literary movement of the 
Fatherland. It will be his province to tell you 
how far this influence of Poe has extended and 
to bring to you the greetings of the German 
nation on this the centennial anniversary of 
the birth of our great alumnus. I have the 
privilege, ladies and gentlemen, of presenting 
Dr. Georg Edward, recently of Germany, at 
present a member of the faculty of Northwest- 
ern University. 

Doctor Edward, speaking of Poe in Ger- 
many, said : 

The purpose of my brief address is to re- 
call to memory the tribute which German lit- 
erature, and, accordingly, the German people 



74 POE CENTENARY 

as a whole, has rendered and is still rendering 
to the genius whose hundredth birthday we 
are celebrating at this time. It will be neces- 
sary, in the very first place, to glance back at 
the way in which Poe gradually became well- 
known in Germany, then to attempt to answer 
the question why at the present time, sixty 
years after the poet's death, the temperament 
of precisely this American author is felt to be 
specifically modern by a European nation; 
why it is that we behold in him a man of let- 
ters who was far in advance of his own times, 
and who, accordingly, must be said to belong 
to no earlier age than our own. 

Poe's relations to German literature, and 
the relations of German literature to Poe, are 
both varied and manifold. The influence of 
Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann upon the 
author of the "Tales of the Grotesque and 
Arabesque" has been but recently investigated 
in detail by Professors Gruener and Cobb. It 
is my purpose merely to show how highly 
prized Poe is in Germany, and why he is re- 
garded there as the typical and characteristic 
American author. That the Germans have 
occupied themselves with him continuously 



POE CENTENARY 75 

and minutely is, perhaps, not an occasion for 
especial comment. Germany is the very home 
of what Goethe called "Cosmopolitan litera- 
ture" (Weltliteratur). There exists in Ger- 
many an almost marvelous familiarity with 
the literature of other nationalities, and it is 
not at all an exaggeration to maintain that 
there is scarcely any important poet or writer 
in the whole world, who has not been treated 
"historisch-kritisch" by some German scholar. 
Furthermore, there has been an endless num- 
ber of translations of foreign works, and even 
poets and authors of very moderate ability 
have often enjoyed a renascence in the German 
tongue. This broadly-flowing stream of trans- 
lations, which the peculiar elasticity and 
adaptability of the German language have 
made so possible, has brought it to pass that 
the German nation, not merely in professional 
literary circles, but in the general group of 
cultured people, is so largely acquainted with 
the literature of other lands. It is on account 
of this fact that the Germans have also ac- 
quired the ability to recognize what is specific- 
ally and characteristically national in the liter- 
ature of other peoples; in other words, the 



76 POE CENTENARY 

Germans have developed a very discriminat- 
ing sense of what is specifically English in 
an English writer, Russian in a Russian, 
French in a Frenchman, or American in an 
American. That which Goethe once affirmed 
concerning French poetry and French litera- 
ture, namely, that it could not possibly be de- 
tached for one moment from the life and the 
emotion of the whole nation, is none the less 
true of every nation's poetry and literature. 
And so it comes to pass that the intimate ac- 
quaintance with various foreign literatures 
which the German people possesses, leads to 
a feeling for the national individuality of an 
author, and the more highly this quality is 
exhibited by a writer, the more is he valued 
in Germany, if only, at the same time, his art 
gives evidence of a certain international spirit. 
In the light of these assertions, the fact that 
the Germans regard Poe as a most prominent 
American writer, nay, in general, as the great- 
est of American authors, assumes an unusual 
significance. 

Poe's naturalization has taken place more 
slowly in Germany than in France. He has, 
to be sure, never enlisted the services of any 



POE CENTENARY 77 

German Baudelaire or Mallarme as inter- 
preter, but, on the other hand, very important 
authors and historians of hterature have been 
his advocates, and his "Raven," at least, has 
found a number of first-rate translators. In 
the period from 1855 to the present day, there 
have appeared three English editions of his 
works in Leipsic, as well as a large number 
of editions of various "Tales" for the use of 
schools. The first translation of his short 
stories appeared in two volumes in Leipsic 
from 1855 to 1858, and to these have been 
added thirteen further translations by most 
varied authors, under the imprint of all sorts 
of publishers. A selected translation of his 
"Poetical Works" has appeared but once, 
namely, that of Hedwig Lachmann, published 
in 1891, but we encounter separate transla- 
tions of separate poems scattered through the 
pages of many journals, and "The Raven" 
has been adapted to the mother-tongue of the 
Germans — with greater or less felicity — some 
dozen times. It is worthy of especial remark 
that the best translation, that by Eduard 
Mauthner, appeared (along with Coppee's 
"The Smiths' Strike") in the so-called "New 
Theatrical Library of Vienna," and has gone 



78 POE CENTENARY 

through three editions, the last in 1894; in 
this transmigration "The Raven" has for a 
long time belonged to the repertoire of the 
"show pieces" of elocutionists, and of those 
actors who occasionally make a public appear- 
ance as reciters. Naturally enough, the 
"Tales" have appeared in many editions, and 
I think it is not without significance that they 
have been taken up by all the "Popular Libra- 
ries," such as those of Reclam, Hendel, Cotta, 
Spemann, and Meyer. It is only within the 
last seven years that a complete German edi- 
tion of Poe's Tales and Poems has appeared, 
with an excellent introduction by the editor : 
the ten volumes constituting "Poe's Werke," 
by Hedda and Arthur Moeller-Bruck, which, 
taken as a unit, must be counted as the most 
important contribution which has been made 
to Poe's memory in Germany up to the 
present time. The only features of this 
edition which we should characterize as in- 
adequate (and in fact far inferior to other 
similar attempts) are the selected poems 
in the translation by Hedwig Lachmann, al- 
ready mentioned, and the now-superseded, 
though meritorious, "Memoir" of Ingram, 
which precedes the first volume. 



POE CENTENARY 79 

The translations and discussions of Poe, 
which have appeared in Germany, cannot 
compare, either in their extent or in their 
influence, with similar contributions which 
have been made in France. For thirteen 
German translations of Poe's Tales in Ger- 
many, we have no less than nineteen in 
France; for one collection of selected poems 
in Germany, four complete translations in 
France; for one complete edition of the 
works in Germany, two such in France. 
But in spite of the fact that French literature 
occupied itself with Poe at an earlier date 
than did the Germans, it need not be as- 
sumed that Poe found an entrance into Ger- 
many by way of France. It is only in the 
most recent years that German interest in 
Baudelaire has breathed new life into the 
interest for Poe; only at the present day has 
Poe come to be recognized as a thoroughly 
modern author. Germany made the ac- 
quaintance of Poe quite as early as did 
France, but there has never been found any 
person among us who made the American 
poet such an object of religious adoration as 
did Baudelaire (the German character is 



80 POE CENTENARY 

very chary about going to quite such lengths 
as this!) or who, Hke Theophile Gautier, 
discovered in him something the hke of 
which the world had never before beheld, an 
intellectual beverage which reminds him of 
"those strange American drinks, compounded 
of fizzing, prickling soda-water, and ice, and 
every . conceivable sort of exotic alcoholic 
ingredient." 

The estimation of Poe in Germany came 
to pass unostentatiously, but has held its 
own consistently. The first thorough dis- 
cussion of the poet I find in Herrig's 
"Hand-Book of North American National 
Literature for the year 1854," a work of very 
little authority on its own account, which 
nevertheless, in spite of mistaken opinions 
and defective information (it speaks of 
"Ulalume" and "Annabel Lee," for instance, 
as "writings"), speaks out clearly and con- 
cisely the certain conviction : "Poe left 
behind him a name which is bound to live in 
the annals of American literature." Poe's 
actual introduction to Germany was due to 
that eminent novelist and author, who has in 
other respects largely contributed to our 



POE CENTENARY 81 

knowledge of America by the democratic 
spirit of his writings — I mean Friedrich 
Spielhagen. It was in 1860 that Spielhagen 
pubHshed in the journal "Europa" a 
thorough-going study of our poet, whom he 
calls the greatest lyric singer that America 
has produced; furthermore, he occupied him- 
self in 1883 with an essay of considerable 
length treating somewhat exhaustively the 
contest between Poe and Longfellow on the 
matter of plagiarism, and, in addition, he 
had already published a translation of a 
number of Poe's poems in the year 1858. 
Two years before that time Adolf Strodtmann 
had published similar translations in his 
"Song- and Ballad-Book of American and 
English Poets," to which he added in 
1870 his widely-circulated "American An- 
thology," a work which besides "The Masque 
of the Red Death" contained "The Raven," 
"Annabel Lee," and "The Bells" in very 
good translations, and in this manner made 
these poems at once famous throughout 
all Germany. Of no less importance is 
the attitude assumed toward Poe by the his- 
torians of literature: Adolf Stern in his 



82 POE CENTENARY 

"History of Recent Literature," Eduard 
Engel in his "History of North American 
Literature," and Carl Bleibtreu in his 
"History of EngHsh Literature" have been 
especially influential in preparing the way 
for an appreciation of Poe in Germany. 
The most important undertaking, one more- 
over that is fully modern in all its tendency, 
is the • already-mentioned translation of Poe's 
works in ten volumes edited by Arthur 
Moeller-Bruck, and which has been com- 
pleted within the past year. With the ex- 
ception of two tales, which could not be 
translated, it contains all the stories of this 
class, and, in addition (for the first time 
in Germany), "Eureka." Moeller-Bruck has 
contributed on his own account a valuable 
essay on "Poe's Creative Activities," which, 
in general, does full justice to Poe's tem- 
perament; in a few places only (he appears 
to be entirely unacquainted with the latest 
literature of the subject, and more par- 
ticularly with Professor Harrison's edition) 
are his results unsatisfactory. The basis of 
his work still continues to be the "Memoir" 
of Ingram, the Edinburg edition of which 
is the foundation of the German work. 



POE CENTENARY 83 

It would carry us too far if I were to 
discuss the numberless essays on Poe which 
have appeared in the leading German 
periodicals. At best I could only give a 
barren resume of their contents, and there- 
with I should surely overstep the bounds of 
time which have been set for my address. 
From the tenor of these articles, however, it 
is easy to discover how we have gradually 
come to the conclusion in Germany that Poe 
is to be regarded as a thoroughly modern 
author, and as the most characteristic 
American poet. In order to understand 
this one must call to mind the evolution 
which German literature has gone through 
in the last twenty years. Apart from those 
circles which are required ex officio to 
concern themselves with German literature, 
we find among English-speaking people a 
very incomplete, not to say a comical con- 
ception of what the Germans have ac- 
complished in this field. German character 
is assuredly not over-easy to understand, 
while its literature, which is the expression 
of this character, is still more complicated 
in its nature. Here in America, where people 



84 POE CENTENARY 

are decidely prone to generalizations, German 
literature is described either as heavy, brood- 
ing, and tasteless, or it is given (by a very 
short process) the general label of "decadent," 
One of these estimates is precisely as 
fatuous as the other. At present we have 
to concern ourselves only with the second, 
however: the expression "decadent" belongs 
to the repertory of those who have to char- 
acterize the "modern." German literature 
has undergone great transformations in the 
last thirty years, just as German philosophy, 
German music, and German art have done. 
After having disposed of "consistent nat- 
uralism," or perhaps as a reaction against 
it, there has appeared an unmistakable new 
era of German psychological development: 
after sensitiveness, romance, the "second 
generation," realism, and naturalism, comes 
a new species of impressionism, Nervosity. 
Almost simultaneously it has influenced the 
entire art, literature, and music of the 
western European continent. It cannot be 
denied that there is a certain element of 
morbidity in all this, but severe psychological 
struggles (and those struggles did precede 



POE CENTENARY 85 

the recent art-movement) never manifest 
themselves without some pathological symp- 
toms. Underneath the hard pressure of the 
Art of the Actual there has been a quest for 
new methods of expression for the infinitely 
subtle variations of feeling which come surg- 
ing in upon the modern individual, and there 
has been a discovery of new sensations, which 
are rooted in the nervous system. I need 
only to call to mind the music of Liszt and 
Wagner, who have attempted to give ex- 
pression to everything inexpressible that 
lies concealed in the innermost depths of 
our souls, or the painting of Bocklin and 
Klinger, who have conducted us into a new 
world of tones and color-impressions — who 
have rendered the finest shadings of emotion 
in a way which could not have been expressed 
at an earlier time. And it is toward this 
goal that the modern literature of western 
Europe is also striving: the new times have 
brought new shades of emotion, and the 
new shades of emotion have demanded new 
methods of expression, and new sensations. 
It is altogether indifferent whether we call 
modern literature symbolistic, impressionistic, 



86- POE CENTENARY 

mystical, or flatly "decadent" : the one thing 
which underlies all these tendencies is the 
striving after something new, something 
remote and strange. But in all this 
"decadent" literature we have not to deal 
with nervous prostration, or nervous irrita- 
tion, or even with the moral corruption of 
modern city-life, but a revolt of the indi- 
vidual against the mediocrity, the dead-level 
of Philistinism, — a battle with materialism, 
with the age of machinery, the prosy morality 
of mere utilitarianism and the struggle for 
existence. 

And how is it in regard to the "Pilgrim 
of Sorrow," as Professor Harrison has 
named him, him whose memory we recall 
today with veneration and love, with a feeling 
of tender regret? Perhaps in his case there 
was not so clear a feeling as with the poets 
of today that he was groping after new sen- 
sations, in order to give expression to the 
emotions which dominated his psychical ex- 
istence. But, consciously or unconsciously, 
certain it is that he stands at the gateway of 
the New Art, tlie art of modern humanity, 
as it comes to meet us at the close of the 



POE CENTENARY 87 

last century. Poe was seeking for the new 
world of actualities, — the very fact that in a 
portion of his works he recoils so sensitively 
from the surrounding unsympathetic world 
of actuality is proof enough of this. He 
made a quest for a means of expression for 
that which moved his inner soul, and the 
forms of expression which sufficed for his 
contemporaries were no longer adequate for 
him. In his significant introduction to Poe's 
poems. Professor Kent has indicated how 
rarely the poet was able to fully express 
what hovered before the eyes of his imagina- 
tion, how "his conceptions were at times far 
beyond his own powers of expression," as 
"much that was written is not understood, 
since with ears we do not hear, and with 
eyes we do not see, for both music and 
vision are for those of poetic temperament and 
artistic gift." How far was Poe, in this 
respect, in advance of his age! Since the 
time when he wrote his melodious lines, our 
feeling for the musical values of language 
has become more and more developed and 
refined, more and more has lyric poetry 
come nearer to the domain of music. The 



88 POE CENTENARY 

very thing which our American poet, so 
sensitive for the tonal effects of his verses, 
strove for, many years ago (as is proven by 
the frequent variants in the different texts 
of his poems), the modern verse-technic is 
striving today to attain, more earnestly than 
ever before. As early as 1900 the Austrian 
writer Rudolf Kassner pointed out, in his 
book "Mysticism, Artists, and Life," Poe's 
high endowment for music. He calls him a 
psychologist of the most painful nicety of 
apprehension, a mystagogue full of intoxi- 
cating rhythm, self-indulgent and yielding, 
a reveler and an adorer of angels, sarcastic 
and moody, a comedian and a fatalist. 
Dante and Poe — one is startled at seeing 
these two names side by side — had one thing 
in common (according to our writer) : the 
necessity of having faith, — Dante because of 
the wealth, and Poe because of the poverty 
of his endowment of conscience. Dante 
believed in Heaven and Hell, Poe in the con- 
tinuation of life in the grave, and his 
theology was mesmerism compounded with 
cryptography. He, too, had his Beatrice, 
whom he celebrated in song quite as subtly as 



POE CENTENARY 89 

did the immortal Florentine. But one thing 
he possessed, of which Dante had no sus- 
picion: — music. It was his divinity, even 
when he was least conscious of it. "And 
what did Virginia Clemm mean for the art 
of Poe? Perhaps at the very moment in 
his life when he was most faithful to her, 
he was rapt away by his divinity. Music." 
That is the music which every modern poet 
and artist carries about in his soul, those are 
the "words ineffable" which in vain strive to 
make their way out into the light of day, and 
which in the end cause the heart to consume 
away upon itself. "Who are these Helens, 
Lenores, Ulalumes," asks Kassner once 
again, "these ghostly beings with violet 
eyes and tremulous lids? His art is not able 
to tell us that. These maidens appear at the 
beginning and end of his dreams, — so much 
art is able to tell. They conduct him into 
enchanted gardens, where enamored roses 
languish in the moonlight; they row him 
in swart craft to the enchanted islands, and 
the waves die away upon the shore like 
yearning after enjoyment; they lead him to 
the castles of death, which, wind-forsaken 



90 POE CENTENARY 

and immersed in eternal night, loom from 
the livid waters of a languid sea ; they speak 
out of graves and point up to the stars. 
Though they appear at the beginning and at 
the end, as the first and last star of the night 
of dreams, nevertheless the dream has 
whelmed them up. This is the art of Edgar 
Allan Poe!" 

That which gives so strong a sense of 
modernity in Poe is not the fact that he led 
the life of a dreamer, that he himself had 
the consciousness of being "no book whose 
meaning has been completely fathomed," to 
speak with Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, but 
"a man with his own contradiction." He 
himself gives expression to this conviction 
when he defends himself (in the preface to 
his "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque") 
against the charge of "Germanism," and 
cries out: "Let us admit, for the moment, 
that the 'phantasy-pieces' now given are 
Germanic, or what not. Then Germanism 
is 'the vein' for the time being. Tomorrow 
I may be anything but German, as yesterday 
I was everything else." And that he was, 
most assuredly: subjected to the never-ending 



POE CENTENARY 91 

changes of the moods of his spirit. And in 
the tales and writings which he has left 
behind him this multifariousness of his 
artistic and literary temperament comes to 
clearest expression. He who wrote most 
melodious stanzas, and who had the utmost 
horror of crass actuality, he it was who 
possessed the knowledge or the presentiment 
of our modern actuality: one has merely to 
recall his criminal stories, or his modern 
types which remind us of similar creations 
in the writings of Dostojewski, or the 
delineation of milieus, as in "The Man of 
the Crowd" which recall impressions in the 
novels of Zola. And alongside of these 
stand those tales, the fancies of his dreams, 
with which he transfigured and beautified 
life, those creations which sprang from his 
vague visions, in which he seems to us a 
visionary or an idealist, — as in his Eureka- 
song. Ethical principles, which he should 
be bound to champion, concerned him not — 
he has no questions to put about the goals 
of humanity, nothing about its future — but 
he possesses that idealism which has fullest 
faith in the greatness, the purity, and the 



92 POE CENTENARY 

depth of human feeHngs, and which has 
called into being creations which alone 
represent these feelings : — William Wilson 
and Roderick Usher and Eleanora, Ligeia, 
Berenice and Morella. And then his fond- 
ness for the horrible, the malicious. One 
has instinctively the feeling that Poe's soul- 
life must have been that of the criminal, as 
though it gave him unspeakable pleasure 
to penetrate into the very depths of crimi- 
nality, to experience its very sensations and 
to follow out the whole course of its origin. 
Such a state of mind is one which is only 
too frequently encountered in daily life, but 
the exceptional thing about Poe is precisely 
this, that he, as poet, is obsessed by this mania, 
and holds fast to it in his writings. Poe is 
the first of that long list of modern authors — 
Krafft-Ebing, Lombroso, Dostojewski, Niet- 
zsche and Bourget — who trace back the evil 
element in man, and consequently his crimi- 
nality and wickedness, to an abnormal mental 
condition. 

And so Poe appears in the category of those 
poets and authors to whom German literary 
research has given the attribute "modern." 



POE CENTENARY 93 

One further reason why Germany gives him 
so high a place is, perhaps, that we stand 
there in a neutral attitude toward the uninvit- 
ing side of his character, his unsparing 
sarcasm, the provocative element in his nature 
which made enemies out of his friends. In 
the older world, where we can look back upon 
generations of artists, authors, and musicians, 
one is only too well aware of the fact that 
those persons who have been humanity's 
richest spiritual benefactors were often, in 
actual life, anything but model citizens and 
blameless toilers. One recognizes, for more 
reasons than need to be specified, that people 
cannot be estimated by set rules, and that 
literature, as well, must reflect both the good 
and the bad, for life is made up of both, and 
both keep the world moving. We are only 
too well aware in Germany how prone Ameri- 
cans are to lay down inflexible rules to which 
even the poet must bend himself. As early 
as in Eduard Engel's "History of North 
American Literature," in which Poe is called 
"an exceptional phenomenon for both British 
and American authorship," we encounter the 
undisguised satire: "The life of all the other 



94 POE CENTENARY 

important American authors passes by 
smoothly; they grow old in honor and abun- 
dance, they play the part of literary patriarchs 
with dignity, and show that authorship in 
America is as brilliant and lucrative a career 
as boring for petroleum or building railroads." 
Is it hard to understand why Poe, finely-or- 
ganized and aristocratic, who did not possess 
the force of character to protect his sensibili- 
ties against the commonalties of daily life, 
became ever more and more embittered ? Why 
he paid back the humiliations which he had 
to endure anew every day of his life, with 
that sarcasm, that unsparing onslaught on the 
mediocrity which shut him in from every side? 
Was he not, in fact, a dreamer out of ancient, 
half-romantic Europe, who was altogether out 
of place in the brutally realistic milieu of the 
new world? Call to mind his sensitive tem- 
perament, his refined conception of poetic art 
and literature, and realize that he was fated 
to do his singing to an age in which the first 
railroads cut their way across the country, in 
which the telegraph made the conquest of the 
world, and steamships and factories darkened 
the sunlight! Poe's fierce irritability towards 



POE CENTENARY 95 

the life which surrounded him, and to which 
he felt himself superior, gave itself breathing- 
space in those criticisms which made the whole 
world his enemy, and plunged him into that 
deep, incurable melancholy which makes the 
theme of his "Raven" and of all his poems : 
the plaint of a heart which is dragged down 
from the highest heights of enthusiasm for 
the true and the beautiful into the mire of 
sordid vulgarity. 

And if the Germans, who cultivate cosmo- 
politan literature, are prone to seek for the 
national trait in every author, they have also 
found this in Poe. The very earliest critics 
called him "the most original spirit in Ameri- 
can literature ;" a nature "in which the leaning 
toward the freakish, melancholy, mysterious 
and awesome coincides with the sense of 
verity, the realistic acumen of the Yankee." 
But it is only the most recent criticism which 
finds in Poe the characteristic American poet, 
the greatest American poet; one of the argu- 
ments in favor of this view is not precisely 
flattering, but the proof is mathematical in 
its logicalness : every poet, who truly bore 
the arms of his calling, has come into conflict 



96 POE CENTENARY 

with actuality, but few have been victorious 
in this struggle, and none has ever emerged 
from it without sore wounds. Is it not there- 
fore logically inevitable that any true poet 
who should come into contact with the 
American life which encounters him in the 
larger northern cities with a materialism 
bordering upon brutality, must go to destruc- 
tion under these influences? An American 
poet was in the nature of things an impossi- 
bility: he could never survive. But there 
haz^e been attempts to treat the matter less 
superficially. In the contemporaries of Poe^ — 
such as Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson and 
Whittier — one has recognized, not American 
poets, but merely those who have continued 
English literature upon American soil. 

In Poe, on the other hand, one recognizes 
an artist who understood American life as 
none other had done, who recognized its crim- 
inal tendencies long before they had reached 
their climax, and who comprehended, decades 
in advance, what an evolution the American 
spirit was destined to undergo in the field of 
inventions and discoveries. To be sure, Poe 
was interested merely in the physiological, or 
rather the pathological side of the American 



POE CENTENARY 97 

temperament, but the one-sidedness of his en- 
tire being is itself a part of the American 
nature. He is thoroughly American, even 
when, compelled to write tales merely in order 
to secure the barest necessities of life, he is 
bound to continually invent what is new, and 
in being able to show interest and curiosity 
where his heart was not directly engaged. 
Curiosity is certainly a most prominent trait 
in American life, or interest, if the other term 
seem offensive. Poe's interest was directed 
toward the most strange and odd mysteries, 
and yet he refused to concern himself with 
things which were ready and finished. All 
that was incomplete, unsolved, unexplained, 
challenged him to pursuit; he was bound to 
complete it with his imagination; and so he 
has told of mysterious secret documents, of 
inexplicable crimes and discoveries, so he has 
tracked out the possibilities of mesmerism, the 
prospects of aerial navigation — such themes as 
these appealed to his interest. But when such 
things became realized, they became totally 
indifferent to him : he had to discover new 
possibilities which should excite his curiosity. 
And yet, even to the last, he never parted 
company with his own self — he remained the 



98 POE CENTENARY 

artist that he was in the beginning, the pilgrim, 
who with bleeding heart is still searching for 
the land of undiscovered beauty. So Spiel- 
hagen greets him and pays him homage: 
"Unfortunate, fortunate man! for, confess it, 
thou hast beheld her, the fairest, the loftiest, 
in those rare, unspeakable moments : and she 
has kissed thee, but in passing, as she kisses 
mortals; but thy soul was filled with the echo 
of those kisses ; and this rapture thou, starving 
one, wouldst not have bartered for all the 
gold of Ormuzd; thou, the greedy for fame, 
wouldst not have sold it for all the glory and 
renown and honor of those who, in thine eyes, 
were no priests at all, who counted themselves 
as priests only because the world counted them 
such!" 

And in this hour, in which we pay our 
homage to the poet, the artist, the author, I, 
too, would bring to him at least one tribute 
from across the sea — a tribute which sprang 
from genuine enthusiasm, and which, how- 
ever insignificant it may appear, gives its testi- 
mony as to how widespread is the knowledge 
of Poe in Germany, how deep the respect. I 
myself belonged, at a very youthful age, to 
a literary group which included Poe among 



POE CENTENARY 99 

its objects of study, out of pure love for the 
theme : we were then scarcely fifteen-year-old 
schoolboys, but we had the genuine reverence 
for the great and the beautiful which had not 
yet been weakened or overcast by any of the 
bitter experiences of life. We also tried our 
hand at translating Poe's poems into our 
mother-tongue, and out of these efforts one 
translation emerged which for its simple, 
melodious beauty surpasses anything which I 
have encountered in these last days while 
busied in preparation for this Commemora- 
tion. It is the touching poem "To My 
Mother," and the translator, of whom I have 
lost all traces for many years, was called 
Friedrich Kraft: — 

Weil ich empfinde, dass der Engel Heer, 

Das fliisternd sich begriisst im Himmelreiche, 

Kein Wortlein findet, sucht es noch so sehr, 

Das dem erhabnen einen "Mutter" gleiche, 

Drum muss ich dir den teuren Namen geben, 

Die du mir mehr als eine Mutter hist — 

In dir allein noch find' ich Kraft zum Leben, 

Jetzt da Virginia mir entrissen ist. 

Die Mutter — meine Mutter, die gestorben — 

War nur die Mutter meiner selbst, doch du 

Gebarst mir die, die ich zum Weib, erworben, 

Und die ich Hebe sonder Rast und Ruh, 

So viel mal sie mir teurer als mein Ich, 

So viel mal mehr verehr' und lieb' ich dich ! 



VI 

IN CABELL HALL, AGAIN 

np^HE final exercises of the Commemoration 
-^ took place in Cabell Hall Tuesday even- 
ing, January 19. President Alderman wel- 
comed the audience: 

We are met again on this evening of the 
Centenary of his birth to honor the memory 
and to study the life and work of Edgar Allan 
Poe, a man of genius, who, for a brief period, 
studied within the halls of this University. 
The task of appraising the value to the world 
of Poe, the poet and the man of letters, has 
been assigned by our committee to the two 
scholars who have already discharged their 
duties so ably and thoughtfully this morning, 
and to two other scholars whom I shall shortly 
have the honor to introduce to you. Professor 
Barrett Wendell, of Harvard University, who 
will speak to you upon "The Nationalism of 

100 



POE CENTENARY 101 

Poe," and Professor Alphonso Smith, of North 
Carolina, who will speak upon the "Ameri- 
canism of Poe." All Americans look up to 
Harvard University with reverence and re- 
spect, especially at this moment when the most 
venerable of our institutions is passing into 
a new epoch of its vigorous life, and I shall 
be pardoned, I am sure, for a feeling for the 
University of North Carolina as close and 
warm as a son may bear. 

It is in no sense my task to discuss in a 
critical way Edgar Allan Poe. I may, how- 
ever, with propriety utter a simple, intimate 
word, expressing for him the tenderness and 
affection which this University has always 
borne for him, as well in the days of his way- 
wardness and eclipse, as in this time, when 
the star of his fame has climbed to the zenith 
and is shining there with intense and settled 
glory. There is nothing finer in the world 
than the love that men bear for institutions, 
unless it be the solemn pride which institutions 
display in men who have partaken of their 
benefits. Celebrations similar to this have been 
held to-day in London and in five American 



102 POE CENTENARY 

cities — New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, 
Richmond and Boston. 

"Seven cities claimed the birth of Homer dead 
Through which the living Homer begged his 
bread." 

That experience of the elder world is re- 
peated to-day save that the number of cities 
is five instead of seven through which the liv- 
ing Poe suffered and struggled. It is the same 
old story, too, of outward defeat and ap- 
parent oblivion, and yet of inward victory 
and a sure grasping of enduring fame, I 
may be frank and say that there was a 
time when Poe did not greatly appeal to 
me. I felt the sheer, clear beauty of his 
song, indeed, as one might feel the beauty 
of the lark's song, but his detachment from 
the world of men, where my interests most 
centered, left me unresponsive and simply 
curious. The great name of poet had held 
place in my thinking as signifying a 
prophet, or as a maker of divine music for 
men to march by towards serener heights. 
My notion of the poet came down to me out of 
the Hebraic training that all of our consciences 



POE CENTENARY 103 

receive; and Poe did not fit into this concep- 
tion. I have come, however, to see the limita- 
tions of that view, and to behold something 
very admirable and strange and wonderful in 
this proud, gifted man, who loved beauty and 
mystery, who had such genius for feeling the 
pain of life and the wonder of it, who grasped 
so vainly at its peace and calm, and who suf- 
fered, one feels, a thousand deaths under its 
disciplines and conventions. To me the glory 
of Poe as a man is that, though whipped and 
scourged by human frailties, he was able to 
keep his heart and vision unstained and to 
hold true to the finest thing in him, so that 
out of this fidelity to his very best there issued 
immortal work. World poets like world con- 
querors are very rare. Not many universities 
have had the fortune to shelter a world poet, 
and to offer him any nourishment. Christ 
College, at Cambridge, has warmed itself at 
the fire of Milton's genius for three hundred 
years. In our own young land, with its short 
intellectual annals, Williams College sheltered 
Bryant for a while; and Virginia, Poe; and 
Harvard, Emerson, Lowell, and Holmes; 
Bowdoin, Longfellow; and Oglethorpe, a little 



104 . POE CENTENARY 

college in Georgia, that other child of genius 
and misfortune, Sidney Lanier. We might 
say, therefore, that only four out of the four 
hundred American colleges have sheltered 
great poets, and perhaps only two, poets of 
world-wide fame, and perhaps only one, a 
world artist. Not such a poet as Sophocles or 
Virgil or Dante or Shakespeare have we 
nourished here, to be sure, but a world poet 
in a legitimate and classic sense. In many of 
these colleges minor poets have appeared, who 
have sung truly and clearly, like our own 
Thompson, and Lucas, and Page, and Lindsay 
Gordon and Armistead Gordon. So long is 
the list of the great singers who knew no 
college training, and so short the list of those 
who did, that we may well cherish here our 
high privileges in the fame of Poe. I have 
often wondered just what the University of 
Virginia did for Poe in that short year of his 
life here. He makes no mention of the Uni- 
versity in his writings, but that is like him 
and his detachment from time and place. He 
saw the University when it was young. He 
must have heard much talk about him of the 
dreams and hopes for the new institution 



POE CENTENARY 105 

founded here on the western borders of the 
young repubHc by the statesman whose renown 
then filled the world. The great philosopher 
of democracy and the great classic artist must 
have often passed each other on the Lawn 
and doubtless often held speech with each 
other, little dreaming that each would share 
with the other the widest fame to be accorded 
to the thousands who would hereafter throng 
these halls. It is probably true that "Annabel 
Lee" and the "Ode to Helen" would have sung 
themselves out of Poe's heart and throat if he 
had never seen the University of Virginia; 
but surely there was genuine inspiration in 
the place in that time of its dim beginnings. 
There were noble books here, few in number 
and great in quality, Coleridge, Byron, 
Shelley, Keats, and the great Greeks were all 
here; sincere scholars from the old world and 
the new had set up their homes here. Here 
were unbeaten youths with young hearts and 
passions; here hopes gleamed and ambitions 
burned. And then, as now, beauty dwelt upon 
the venerable hills encircling the horizon, and 
the University itself lay new and chaste in its 
simple lines upon the young Lawn. I venture 



106 POE CENTENARY 

to think sometimes that when our poet wrote 
those statehest lines of his — 

To the glory that was Greece, 
And the grandeur that was Rome — • 

perhaps there flashed into his mind's eye the 
vision of the Rotunda upon some such night 
as this, with its soaring columns whitened by 
the starlight and vying with the beauty and 
witchery of the white winter about it. 

It is perhaps easier to answer the question, 
What has Poe done for the University? We 
hear much of endowments in connection with 
universities. The words donor and endow- 
ment are the technical phrases of college ad- 
ministration baffling and alluring the builders 
of universities. Poe has endowed his alma 
mater with immortal distinction, and left it a 
legacy which will increase with the years. 
This legacy is not endowment of money, for 
there was no scrip left in his poor purse, but 
simply the endowment of a few songs and a 
fund of unconquerable idealism. I am not of 
those who believe that Poe has been to our 
young men a kind of star that has lighted 
them to their destruction, as some good 



POE CENTENARY 107 

Presbyterians believe Burns to have been to 
the youth of Scotland. The vast tragedy of 
his life, its essential purity, its hard work, the 
unspeakable pity of it, have kept his name a 
name of dignity and the suggestions of his 
career to modern youth are suggestions of 
beauty and of labor. Let us concede that he 
was no exemplar or pattern of correct living 
to whom we can point our youth, but the fact 
that there is a little room on West Range in 
which dwelt a world poet who never wrote 
an unclean word, and who sought after beauty 
in form as passionately as a coarse man might 
seek after gain, has contributed an irreducible 
total of good to the spirit which men breathe 
here, as well as a wide fame to his alma mater 
that will outlive all ill-fortune, change, or 
disaster. May I call this spiritual residuum 
a clear tradition of beauty and poetic under- 
standing, a feeling for the gold and not the 
dross in life, a genius for reverence, an in- 
stinct for honor, and an eye to see, burning 
brightly, the great realities that are wont to 
pale and disappear before the light of common 
day? 



108 POE CENTENARY 

Poems contributed for the occasion were 
read. The following, by Robert Burns Wil- 
son, entitled "Genius," was "inscribed with 
great admiration and esteem to Dr. Charles 
W. Kent:" 

Not in the courts of kings alone 

Are found life's princes of the blood: 
They rise and reign where field and flood 

Know not the temple nor the throne. 

From some unnoted, silent dawn 

Their souls receive the golden dower; 
And conscious of their spirit's power 

They put the crimson mantle on. 

Across the desert of their days 

They look with fixed imperious eyes 
And on some sky, beyond the skies, 

They bend the soul's untiring gaze. 

In that far, undistracted bourne. 

They build the kingdom of the mind : 
And there — unvexed by Fate's ill wind, — 

They rule unmoved — in might unshorn. 



POE CENTENARY 109 

The sculptured glory of that dream 

Through all the echoing courts they know : 
The domes — the palaces of snow — 

The bastioned walls that glow and gleam. 

The clouded-mighty arches ring 
With music and the mingling call 
Of trumpets and, above them all, 

The cry — The King! — It is the King!! 

Far-faded from their fancy's ken 
The fashion of the world's regard; 
Alike to them the wounding shard. 

The censure and the praise of men. 

The small mind's hate — the world's disdain. 
The fool's forlorn felicity : — 
The masked and mocking mimicry — 

All menace, their set minds make vain. 

Yet from a race which cannot fail, 
The torch, instinctively, they bear; 
Their destined course they keep — they dare 

Some new and untried sea to sail. 



110 POE CENTENARY 

Creative, undisturbed, they see 
The super-truth in Beauty's mold; 
In form — the soul, in clay — the gold, 

Not man's day, but eternity. 

Across the desert of their days 
The never-ceasing voices call; 
They do not fear nor faint nor fall 

Nor change their soul's untiring gaze. 

Not in the courts of kings alone 

Are found life's princes of the blood : 
They rise and reign where field and flood, 

Know not the temple nor the throne. 



POE CENTENARY 111 

Mr. Ben C. Moomaw, of Virginia: 
Edgar Ali^an Poe 

I 

Lo! ever among the bards was he the 

wondrous Israfel, 
For never to the listening world sang they so 

wildly well; 
Nor ever in all the earth arose, from lips that 

mortal be, 
A burst of song so marvelous, a holier 

melody ! 
The soul that soaring sought the sky across 

the starlit way 
Was not a soul of the sordid earth, whatever 

the world may say, — 
Was not a sodden soul of the clod, whatever 

the clods may say. 

II 

Vain is the orient vision for eyes that can- 
not see, 

And silent are the morning stars to ears that 
heavy be. 

And sweet the song of minstrel to none in all 
this earth 

Whoso the godlike song shall hold a thing of 
little worth; 



112 POE CENTENARY 

And silent so for weary years the poet's lyre 

has been, 
And mute the singing lips to-day amid the 

haunts of men 
Hushed by the clamor of the earth, by the 

clamor of noisy men. 

Ill 

Wide are the reaches of the sea, and far the 

flight of time, 
And many mysteries there be in every earthly 

clime. 
But not the sea, nor time, nor space, nor 

mysteries of men. 
Nor soaring height nor darkling depth escape 

the searching ken 
Of him whose song unearthly, like the splendor 

of the sun. 
The aureate glory kindleth that makes the 

nations one; — 
For the joy of love and the sorrow of life, 

maketh the whole world one. 

IV 

For yet his vibrant song was like the sobbing 

of the sea, — 
The Sea! — the awful glory and the rhythm 

of the sea, 



POE CENTENARY 113 

Akin in stately measure, to the whirling of 

the spheres; 
The noble measured marching of innumerable 

years 
Adown the magic corridors, where mighty 

anthems roll. 
In the mystic gloom and glory of the elemental 

soul, — 
The tragic world, and infinite, that centers in 

the soul. 

V 

Alike the choral grandeur in the temple of the 

night,— 
The thunder of the tempest in the waning ot 

the light; 
The mournful sighing of the wind amid the 

wintry wood; 
The splendid diapason of the universal 

flood; 
The threnody of sorrow in the soul that never 

dies, — 
Thus sang the bard whose lyre rang the 

anthems of the skies, 
And showered on a listening world the starry 

melodies. 



114 POE CENTENARY 

VI 

Afar the centuries may wing their never rest- 
ing flight, 
Empires arise, and vanish then in an eternal 

night. 
While be the annals of the race to joy or 

sorrow given, 
While yet we borrow love of life, or hope ot 

bounteous heaven. 
So shall his fame enduring be, a coronal 

sublime ; 
A burst of cosmic light upon the skies of every 

clime ; 
A path of dazzling splendor to the far oft 

bounds of time. 

VII 

Oh ye who zealous are to blame the weakness 
of the man, 

Who virtuous, blaze to all the world your un- 
relenting ban. 

Aye, doubtless are ye without guilt to hurl the 
sinless stone. 

And crush a quivering heart. But stay, it is 
not nobly done, 

For if there be — or much there be — that we 
have not forgiven, 



POE CENTENARY 115 

Remember that the sternest tongue is shamed 

by silent heaven, — 
That e'en a thousand tireless tongues are 

hushed by piteous heaven. 

VIII 

Though Truth is Argus-eyed and stern, pity- 
ing Love is blind. 

And twain they are in all the world save in 
the noblest mind. 

But wed they are where angels fare, and lo! 
the heavenly song 

The breathless skies acclaim to-night, the sing- 
ing stars prolong; — 

The choral stars, — and lo! a star lost to its 
native light 

Has lifted songs of beauty amid the Stygian 
night,— 

Has lifted marvelous melodies out of the 
gloomy night. 

IX 

Thus e'er it was and e'er shall be while earthly 

cycles roll. 
The sweetest music of the world swells from 

the saddest soul; 



116 POE CENTENARY 

But since the guard at Eden's gate who held 

the ghttering sword 
Hath sheathed its flaming terrors in the pity 

of the Lord, 
The luminous soul hath borne afar its golden 

argosies 
From the moorings of its sorrow to the beauty 

of the skies, — • 
From earthly ports in shadow to the splendor 

of the skies. 

X 

Aye, thus it is that of the bards the wondrous 

Israfel 
Is he, for never a mortal bard has sung so 

wildly well; 
Nor ever in all the earth arose from lips that 

mortal be, 
A burst of song so marvelous, so pure a 

melody. 
The soaring soul that sought the sky across 

the starlit way 
Was not a soul of the sordid earth, whatever 

the world may say, — 
Was not a sodden soul of the clod, whatever 

the clods may say. 



POE CENTENARY 117 

Dr. Barrett Wendell, of Harvard, speaking 
on "The Nationalism of Poe," said: 

One hundred years ago to-day, Edgar Allan 
Poe was born in Boston. The vital records 
of that period are scanty and defective. It is 
only within the past two weeks that my friend, 
Mr. Walter Watkins, has collected, from the 
newspapers of 1808 and 1809, notices of all 
the plays in which the parents of Poe appeared 
during that season. From them it is clear 
that Mrs. Poe withdrew from the stage about 
Christmas time, 1808, and returned only on 
February 9th, 1809, when one of the news- 
papers congratulated her on her happy re- 
covery from her confinement. This is appar- 
ently the most nearly contemporary record of 
Poe's birth. The researches of Mr. Watkins 
did not end here. It had been supposed that 
all record of Poe's birthplace was lost; and 
indeed it is improbable that he himself ever 
knew just where it was. By examining the 
tax lists for 1808 and 1809, Mr. Watkins dis- 
covered that David Poe was taxed that year 
as resident in a house owned by one Henr}' 
Haviland, who had bought the property, a few 



118 POE CENTENARY 

years before, from a Mr. Haskins, a kinsman, 
I believe, of the mother of Ralph Waldo Emer- 
son, The house was pulled down some fifty 
years ago; but Mr. Watkins has ascertained 
from the records that it was situated at what 
is now No. 62 Carver Street. In 1809, this 
was a respectable, though not a fashionable, 
part of the city. There Poe was born. 

The circumstances of Poe's career were rest- 
less; on the whole, they were solitary. 
Throughout his forty years of mortal sunlight 
and shadow, he was never quite in accord 
with his surroundings. He was never tried 
by either of the tests for which ambition 
chiefly longs — the gravely happy test of wide 
responsibility, or the stimulatingly happy test 
of dominant success. Troublous from begin- 
ning to end his earthly life seems; to him, 
this world could not often have smiled con- 
tagiously sympathetic. So much is clear; and 
yet a little more is clear as well. When he 
sought sympathy, or found semblance of it, 
and thus for a little while could feel trouble 
assuaged, he could find it most nearly among 
those generous phases of Southern spirit 
which surrounded the happier years of his 



POE CENTENARY 119 

youth. There was Httle trace of it, for him, 
in the still half-Puritan atmosphere of that 
New England where he chanced, a stranger, 
to see the light. 

So it was with deep and reverent sense of 
your Southern generosity that I received your 
grave and friendly summons to join with you 
here and now. Here, in this sanctuary of 
Virginia tradition, you have not scrupled to 
call me from the heart of New England, to 
pay tribute not only for myself, and for 
my own people, but tribute in the name of 
us all, to the memory of Poe. If one could 
only feel sure of performing such a task 
worthily, no task, of duty or of privilege, 
could be more solemnly happy. For none 
could more wonderfully imply how Virginians 
and the people of New England, — each still 
themselves, — have so outlived their long 
spiritual misunderstandings of one another 
that with all our hearts we can gladly join 
together, as fellow countrymen, in celebrating 
the memory of one recognized everywhere as 
the fellow-countryman of us all. 

For everywhere is no hyperbolic word to 
describe the extent of Poe's constantly extend- 



120 POE CENTENARY 

ing fame, sixty years after they laid him in 
his grave. His name is not only eminent in 
the literary history of Virginia, or of New- 
York, or of America; it has proved itself 
among the very few of those native to America 
which have commanded and have justified ad- 
miration throughout the civilized world. Even 
this does not tell the whole story. So far as 
we can now discern, he has securely risen 
above the mists of time and the fogs of ac- 
cident. His work may appeal to you or leave 
you deaf; you may adulate it or scrutinize it, 
as you will; you may dispute as long and as 
fruitlessly as you please concerning its positive 
significance or the magnitude of its greatness. 
The one thing which you cannot do — the thing 
for which the moment is forever past — is to 
neglect it. Forever past, as well, all loyal 
Americans must gladly find the moment, — if 
indeed there ever was a moment, — when any 
of us could even for an instant regret it. There 
is no longer room for any manner of question 
that the work of Poe is among the still few 
claims which America can as yet urge un- 
challenged in proof that our country has 
enriched the literature of the world. Even 



POE CENTENARY 121 

with no other reason than this, loyal Americans 
must already unite in cherishing his memory. 

So true, so obvious, this must seem to-day 
that we are prone, in accepting it, to forget 
the marvel of it, as we forget the marvels of 
Nature, — of sunrise, of sleep, of birth, of 
memory itself. The marvel of it, in truth, is 
none the less reverend because, Hke these, we 
need never find it miraculous. Happily for us 
all, — happily for all the world, — Poe is not 
an isolated, sporadic phenomenon in our 
national history. He was an American of the 
nineteenth century. If we ponder never so 
little on those commonplace words, we shall 
find them charged with stirring truth. To 
summarize the life of any nation, there is no 
better way than to turn to the successive cen- 
turies of its history, and to ask yourself, with 
no delay of slow or painful study, what names 
and what memories, unborn at the beginning 
of these epochs, were in enduring existence 
when they ended. When we thus consider our 
United States of America, the spiritual 
splendor of the nineteenth century glows 
amazing. 

That nineteenth century, as we all gravely 



122 POE CENTENARY 

know, was by no means a period of national 
concord. Rather, far and wide, it was a period 
when the old order was fatally passing, yield- 
ing place to new. Thus inevitably, throughout 
our country, it was a period of honest and 
noble passion running to the inspiring height 
of spiritual tragedy. For no tragedy can be 
more superbly inspiring than that of epochs 
when earnestly devoted human beings, spiritu- 
ally at one in loyalty to what they believe the 
changeless ideals of truth and of righteous- 
ness, are torn asunder by outbreaks of such 
tremendous historic forces as make the me- 
chanical forces of Nature seem only thin 
parables, imaging the vaster forces still which 
we vainly fancy to be immaterial. It is not 
until epochs like this begin to fade and sub- 
side into the irrevocable certainty of the past 
that we can begin to perceive the essential 
unity of their grandeur. Nothing less than 
such supreme ordeal of conflict can finally 
prove the quality and the measure of heroes; 
and in the stress and strain, no human vision 
can truly discern them all; but once proved 
deathless, the heroes stand side by side, im- 
mortally brethren. So, by and by, we come 



POE CENTENARY 123 

wondrously to perceive that we may honour 
our own heroes most worthily, — most in the 
spirit which they truly embodied, most, I be- 
lieve, as they themselves would finally bid us, 
if our ears could still catch the accents of their 
voices, — when we honour with them their 
brethren who, in the passing years of passion, 
seemed for a while their foes. 

When we of America thus contemplate the 
nineteenth century, we cannot fail to rejoice 
in the memories it has left us. They are so 
many, so full of inspiration, so various in all 
but the steadfastness with which they with- 
stand the deadening test of the years, that it 
would be distracting, and even invidious, to 
call the roll of our heroes at a moment like 
this. What more truly and deeply concerns 
us is an evident historical fact, generally true 
of all the human careers on which our heroic 
memories of the nineteenth century rest un- 
shaken. Among those careers almost all — 
North and South, East and West — won, in 
their own time, distinguished public recogni- 
tion. What I have in mind we may best real- 
ize, perhaps, if for a moment we imagine our- 
selves in some nineteenth century congregation 



124 POE CENTENARY 

of our countrymen, similar to this where we 
are gathered together. Fancy, for example, 
the companies assembled to welcome Lafay- 
ette, far and wide, during his last visit to our 
nation, which he had helped call mto being. 
Among the American worthies then in their 
maturity, and still remembered by others than 
their own descendants, almost every one would 
already have been well and widely known. A 
local stranger in any such assemblage, to 
whom his host should point out the more dis- 
tinguished personages then present, would 
generally have found their names not only 
memorable but distinguished, just as we should 
find them still. And what would thus have 
been the case in 1824 would have stayed so, 
five and twenty years later. The heroes of oui 
olden time were mostly gladdened by the 
consciousness of recognized and acknowledged 
eminence. 

Now, in contrast with them, let us try to 
imagine a figure which might perhaps have 
attracted the eye in some such American as- 
semblage sixty-five years ago. Glancing 
about, you might very likely have observed 
a slight, alert man, with rather lank, dark hair, 



POE CENTENARY 125 

and deep, restless eyes. His aspect might 
hauntingly have attracted you, and set you to 
wondering whether he was young or old. On 
the whole you might probably have felt that 
he looked distrustful, defiant if not almost 
repellant, certainly not ingratiating, or en- 
gagingly sympathetic. Yet there would have 
hovered about him an impalpable atmosphere 
of fascination, which would have attracted 
your gaze back to him again and again; and 
each new scrutiny would have increased your 
impression that here was some one solitary, 
apart, not to be confused with the rest. He 
would hardly have been among the more dis- 
tinguished personages, on the platform or at 
the high table. You might well have wondered 
whether anybody could tell you his name. 
And if, in answer to a question, your neighbor 
had believed that this was Edgar Allan Poe, 
you might very probably have found the name 
by no means familiar. You would perhaps 
have had a general impression that he had 
written for a good many magazines, and the 
like, — that he had produced stories, and 
verses, and criticism, but the chances are that 
you would not clearly have distinguished him 



126 POE CENTENARY 

unless as one of that affluent company of 
literati who illustrated the '40's, and who are 
remembered now only because their names 
occur in essays preserved among Poe's col- 
lected Avorks. Almost certainly he would 
hardly have impressed you as a familiarly 
memorable personage. His rather inconspicu- 
ous solitude would not have seemed note- 
worthy. Very likely, if you were a stranger 
thereabouts, you would have paid little more 
attention to his presence, but would rather have 
proceeded to inquire who else, of more solid 
quality, was then and there worth looking at. 
All this might well have happened little 
more than sixty years ago; and though to 
some of us sixty years may still seem to 
stretch long, they are far from transcending 
the period of human memory. It would be 
by no means remarkable if in this very com- 
pany, here present, there were some who can 
remember the year 1845, or the election of 
President Taylor. Beyond question, every 
one of us has known, with something like 
contemporary intimacy, friends and relatives, 
only a little older than ourselves in seeming, 
to whom those years remained as vivid as you 



POE CENTENARY 127 

shall find the administration of President 
Roosevelt. That olden time, in fact, when 
amid such congregations as this, anywhere 
throughout America, the presence of Poe 
would hardly have been remarked, has not 
quite faded from living recollection. And yet, 
at this moment, there is no need to explain 
anywhere why we are come together here, 
from far and wide, to honor his memory. 
Not only all of us here assembled, not only 
all Virginia, and all New York, and all New 
England, and all our American countrymen be- 
side, but the whole civilized world would in- 
stantly and eagerly recognize the certainty of 
his eminence. What he was, while still en- 
meshed in the perplexity of earthly circum- 
stance, is already become a matter of little else 
than idle curiosity. What he is admits of no 
dispute. So long as the name of America shall 
endure, the name of Poe will persist, in serene 
certainty, among those of our approved na- 
tional worthies. 

In all our history, I believe, there is no more 
salient contrast than this between the man in 
life and his immortal spirit. Just how or 
when the change came to be we need not 



128 POE CENTENARY 

trouble ourselves to dispute. It is enough for 
us, during this little while when we are to- 
gether, that we let our thoughts dwell not on 
the Poe who was but on the Poe who is. And 
even then we shall do best not to lose our- 
selves in conjectures concerning his positive 
magnitude, or his ultimate significance, when 
you measure his utterances with what we con- 
ceive to be absolute truth, or the scheme of the 
eternities. We should be content if we can 
begin to assure ourselves of what he is, and 
of why. 

The Poe whom we are met to celebrate is 
not the man, but his work. Furthermore, it 
is by no means all the work collected in those 
volumes where studious people can now trace, 
with what edification may ensue, the history, 
the progress, the ebb and the flow, of his 
copious literary production. His extensive 
criticism need not detain or distract us; it is 
mostly concerned with ephemeral matters, for- 
gotten ever since the years when it was writ- 
ten. His philosophical excursions, fantastic 
or pregnant as the case may finally prove to 
be, we need hardly notice. The same is true 
concerning his copious exposition of literary 



POE CENTENARY 129 

principle, superficially grave, certainly ingen- 
ious, perhaps earnest, perhaps impishly fantas- 
tic. All of these, and more too, would inevi- 
tably force themselves on our consideration 
if we were attempting to revive the Poe who 
was. At this moment, however, we may neg- 
lect them as serenely as we may neglect scru- 
tiny of outward and visible signs — such ques- 
tions as those of where he lived and when and 
for how long, of what he did in his private 
life, of whom he made love to and what he 
ate for dinner, of who cut his waistcoats, and 
of how — if at all — he paid for them. The 
very suggestion of such details may well and 
truly seem beneath the dignity of this moment. 
They are forced into conscious recognition 
not by any tinge of inherent value, but be- 
cause of the innocently intrusive pedantry 
now seemingly inseparable from the ideal of 
scholarship. We have passed, for the while, 
beyond the tyranny of that scholarly mood 
which used to exhaust its energy in analysis 
of every word and syllable and letter through- 
out the range of literature. From sheer re- 
action, I sometimes think, we are apt nowa- 
days, when concerned with letters, to pass our 



130 POE CENTENARY 

time, even less fruitfully than if we were still 
grammarians, in researches little removed 
from the impertinence of gossip. And gossip 
concerning memorable men and women is 
only a shade less futile than gossip concern- 
ing the ephemeral beings who flit across our 
daily vision. So far as it can keep us awake 
from superstitious acceptance of superhuman 
myth, it may perhaps have its own little salu- 
tary function. If it distract us from such 
moods of deeper sympathy as start the vagrant 
fancies of myth-makers, it does mischief as 
misleading as any ever wrought by formal 
pedantry, and without the lingering grace of 
traditional dignity. Your truly sound schol- 
arship is concerned rather with such questions 
as we are properly concerned with here and 
now. Its highest hope, in literary matters, is 
to assert and to maintain persistent facts in 
their enduring values. In the case of Poe, for 
example, its chief questions are first of what 
from among his copious and varied work has 
incontestably survived the conditions of his 
human environment, and secondly of why this 
survival has occurred. What contribution did 
Poe make to lasting literature? Does this 



POE CENTENARY 131 

justly belong to the literature of the world, 
as well as to that of America? In brief, why- 
is he so memorable as we all acknowledge by 
our presence here today? 

Stated thus, these questions are not very 
hard to answer. The Poe of literature is the 
writer of a good many tales, or short stories, 
and of a few intensely individual, though not 
deeply confidential, poems. Stories and po- 
ems alike stand apart not only from all others 
in the literature of America, but — I believe 
we may agree — from any others anywhere. 
Some profoundly, some rather more superfi- 
cially, they all possess, in their due degree, an 
impalpable quality which the most subtle of 
us might well be at pains to define, but which 
the most insensitive man imaginable can al- 
ways, surely, recurrently feel. The most re- 
markable phase of the impression they thus 
make is probably the complete and absolute 
certainty of its recurrence. Turn, whenever 
you will and in whatever mood, to any of 
Poe's work which has proved more than 
ephemeral. Tale or poem, it may chance ei- 
ther to appeal to you or to repel you. In one 
mood you may think it inspired; in another. 



132 POE CENTENARY 

you may find it little better than prankishly 
artificial. You may praise it until dissent gape 
breathless at your superlatives ; or you may re- 
lentlessly point out what you are pleased to 
believe its limitations, its artificialities, its pat- 
ent defects. Even then, a very simple question 
must bring you to pause. Let anybody ask 
you what this piece of literature is like, or 
what is like it, — let anybody ask with what 
we should match it. Whether you love it or 
are tempted to disdain it, you must be forced 
to the admission that it is almost unique. 
Whatever its ultimate significance, the better 
work of Poe remains altogether itself, and 
therefore altogether his. This gleams the- 
more vividly as you come to recognize how 
his individuality asserts itself to you, whatever 
your own passing mood, under any imaginable 
conditions. The utterance of Poe is as in- 
contestably, as triumphantly, itself as is the 
note of a song bird — as poets abroad have 
found the music of the skylark, or of the 
nightingale, or as our own countryfolk find 
the call of the whip-poor-will echoing through 
the twilight of American woods. 

His individuality, the while, is of a kind for 



POE CENTENARY 133 

which our language hardly affords a name 
more exact than the name poetic. The acci- 
dent that we are generally accustomed to con- 
fuse the spirit of poetry with some common 
features of poetic structure can mislead us 
only for a moment. Poetry is not essentially 
a matter of rhyme or meter, of measure and 
quality in sound or syllable. The essence of 
it is not material but spiritual. There are few 
more comprehensive descriptions of it than 
the most familiar in all English literature: — 

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet 

Are of imagination all compact: — 

One sees more devils than vast Hell can hold, — 

That is, the madman; the lover, all as frantic. 

Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt; 

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling. 

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to 

heaven; 
And, as imagination bodies forth 
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
A local habitation and a name. 

In all the literature of America, and indeed 
in all that of the English language, you will 
be at pains to point out utterances more illus- 
trative of these lines, — I had almost said more 
definative, — than you shall find in the tales and 



134 POE CENTENARY 

the poems of Poe at their surviving best. Mo- 
mentarily illusive though his concrete touches 
may sometimes make his tales, — and he pos- 
sessed, to a rare degree, the power of arousing 
"that willing suspension of disbelief for the 
moment which constitutes poetic faith," — the 
substance of his enduring phantasies may al- 
ways be reduced to the forms of things un- 
known, bodied forth by sheer power of im- 
agination. To these airy nothings the cunning 
of his pen, turning them to shapes, gives local 
habitations and names so distinct and so vivid 
that now and again you must be at pains to 
persuade yourself that in final analysis they 
are substantially unreal. Yet unreal they al- 
ways prove at last, phantasmally and haunt- 
ingly immaterial. They are like figured tap- 
estries spun and woven, warp and woof, from 
such stuff as dreams are made of. Only the 
dreams are not quite our own. The dreamer 
who has dreamed them is the poet who has 
woven them into this fabric, making them now 
forever ours as well as his. Without his own 
innermost life they could never have come into 
being at all. Without his consummate crafts- 
manship, itself almost a miracle, they must 



POE CENTENARY 135 

have hovered inexorable beyond the range of 
all other consciousness than his who dreamed 
them. Dreamer and craftsman alike, and su- 
preme, it is he, and none but he, who can make 
us feel, in certain most memorable phases, the 
fascinating, fantastic, elusive, incessant mys- 
tery of that which must forever environ hu- 
man consciousness, unseen, unknown, impal- 
pable, implacable, undeniable. 

The mood we are thus attempting to de- 
fine is bafflingly elusive; it has no precise sub- 
stance, no organic or articulate form. It is 
essentially a concept not of reason, or even of 
pervasive human emotion, but only of poetry 
— a subtly phantasmal state of spirit, e vocable 
only by the poet who has been endowed with 
power to call it from the vasty deep where, 
except for him, it must have lurked forever. 
If it were not unique, it could not be itself; 
for it would not be quite his, and whatever is 
not quite his is not his at all. So much we 
may confidently assert. And yet if we should 
permit ourselves either to rest with the asser- 
tion, or to stray in fancy through conclusion 
after conclusion towards which it may have 
seemed to lead us, we should remain or wan- 



136 POE CENTENARY 

der mischievously far from the truth. That 
Poe's imagination was soHtary, Hke so much 
of the circumstances of his hfe, we need not 
deny or dispute. Clearly, nevertheless, he 
lived his solitary life not in some fantastic 
nowhere, but amid the familiarly recorded 
realities of these United States of America, 
during the first half of the nineteenth century. 
It is equally clear that throughout the years 
when his solitary poetic imagination was 
giving to its airy nothings their local habita- 
tions and their names, countless other 
poetic imaginations, at home and abroad, 
were striving to do likewise, each in its own 
way and fashion. Solitary, apart, almost 
defiant though the aspect of Poe may 
have seemed, isolated though we may still 
find the records of his life, or the creatures 
of his imagination, he was never anach- 
ronistic. Even the visual image of his rest- 
less presence, which we tried to call up a 
little while ago, will prove on scrutiny not 
only individual, but outwardly cast in the 
form and the habit of its own time — to 
the very decade and year of the almanac. 
With his dreams, and with the magic fabrics 



POE CENTENARY 137 

into which he wrought them, the case is 
much the same. Neither dreams nor fabrics, 
any more than his bodily presence, could have 
been quite themselves — and still less could 
the dreams and the fabrics have fused 
forever in their wondrous poetic harmonies — 
during any other epoch than that wherein 
Poe lived and moved and had his being. 

What I mean must soon be evident if we 
stop to seek a general name for the kind 
of poetical mood which Poe could always 
evoke in so specific a form and degree. 
The word is instantly at hand, inexact and 
canting if you will, but undeniable. It is 
the word which his contemporaries might 
carelessly, yet not untruly, have applied to 
his personal appearance, alluring to the eye 
if only for the quiet defiance of his tem- 
peramental solitude. It is the word by which 
we might most fitly have characterized such 
impulsive curiosity as should have impelled 
us, if we had seen him, to inquire who 
this mysterious-looking stranger might be. 
It is the word — misused, teasing, elusive — by 
which we are still apt indefinitely to define 
the general aesthetic temper of his time, all 



138 POE CENTENARY 

over the European and American world. 
We use it concerning all manner of emo- 
tion and of conduct, and all phases of 
literature or of the other fine arts throughout 
their whole protean ranges of expression. 
You will have guessed already, long before 
I come to utter it, the word thus hovering 
in all our minds — the word romantic. 

If we should hereupon attempt formally 
to define what this familiar word means, 
there would be no hope left us. Turn, as 
widely as you will, to dictionaries, to en- 
cyclopaedias, to volumes, and to libraries 
of volumes. Each may throw its ray of 
light on the matter; none will completely 
illuminate it or irradiate. You might as well 
seek words which should comprehend, in 
descriptive finality, the full, delicate, sensuous 
truth of the savor of a fruit or of the scent 
of a flower. Yet, for all this, there are 
aspects of romanticism on which we may 
helpfully dwell; and of these the first is an 
acknowledged matter of history. Throughout 
all parts of the world then dominated by 
European tradition, the temper of the first 
half of the nineteenth century was strongly 



POE CENTENARY 139 

romantic. This was nowhere more evident 
than in the spontaneous outburst of poetry 
which, in less than twenty years, enriched 
the roll of English poets with the names 
of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, 
Byron, and Scott. Now the way in which 
this period of poetry was lately described in 
an American announcement of teaching may 
help us to perceive with a little more approach 
to precision, one feature of what ro- 
manticism everywhere means. Some worthy 
professor, doubtless chary of indefinite terms, 
chose to describe the romantic poets as 
those of the period when the individual 
spirit revived in English literature. Poetic 
or not, this sound instructor of youth was 
historically right. The very essence of ro- 
manticism lies in passionate assertion of 
literary or artistic individuality. Where- 
fore, as we can now begin to feel sure, that 
romantic isolation of Poe's has double 
significance; it not only marks him, apart 
from others, as individual, but it defines him, 
at the same time, as an individual of his 
own romantic period. 

We shall not go astray, then, if we ponder 



140 POE CENTENARY 

for a little while on this whole romantic 
generation. Before long, we may content- 
fully agree that the individualism of the 
romantic poets resulted everywhere from 
their passionate declaration of independence 
from outworn poetic authority. The precise 
form of poetic authority from which they 
thus broke free was the pseudo-classic tra- 
dition of the eighteenth century — in matters 
literary a period of formal rhetorical decency, 
and of a cool common-sense which had 
little mercy for the vagaries of uncontrolled 
sesthetic emotion. Already we may well 
feel insecure. We are straying, beyond dis- 
pute, into dangerously elusive generalization, 
interminably debatable. Yet, if our present 
line of thought is to lead us anywhere, we 
must not hesitate to generalize more boldly 
still. That same eighteenth century, from 
which romanticism broke free, was not a 
sporadic and intensive episode in the history 
of European culture; it was the culmination 
of a period at least five hundred years long. 
This period began when the reviving critical 
scholarship of the Renaissance brought back 
to the dominant upper consciousness of 



POE CENTENARY 141 

Europe vivid understanding of the facts of 
classical antiquity; and when, so doing, it 
began to suppress the vigorous and splendid 
body of intervening tradition and temper 
to which we have consequently given the 
name of mediaeval. In matters literary, at 
least, the spirit which began with the 
Renaissance persisted until the Revolution 
of the dying eighteenth century prepared the 
way for that nineteenth century, of romantic 
freedom, wherein Poe lived and did his 
living work. 

Already we can begin to see that there 
was some analogy between the Middle Ages, 
which preceded the Renaissance, and the 
epoch of romanticism which ensued after 
the eighteenth century. Both periods, at 
least, were free each in its own way from 
the intellectual control of such formal 
classicism or pseudo-classicism as intervened. 
A little closer scrutiny of the Middle Ages 
may therefore help us to appreciate 
what nineteenth-century romanticism meant. 
Throughout that whole mediaeval period, 
we may soon agree, the intellect of Europe 
was authoritatively forbidden to exert itself 



142 POE CENTENARY 

beyond narrowly fixed and rigid limits. 
European emotion, meanwhile, was per- 
mitted vagrant and luxuriant freedom of 
range and of expression. It might wander 
wherever it would. In contrast with this 
period, we can now perceive, the Renaissance 
may be conceived as an intellectual declara- 
tion of independence; and through a full five 
hundred years, the intellect of Europe was 
increasingly free. Its very freedom made 
it, in turn, tyrannical. At least in the matters 
of temper and of fashion, it repressed, con- 
trolled, or ignored the ranges of emotion 
which had flourished during its subjection. 
In literature its tyranny extended far and 
wide. Though for awhile thought was 
permitted to range more or less free, emotion 
was at best sentimentalized. So, when the 
centuries of tyranny were past, poetry, if 
it were ever to regain full freedom of 
emotional existence, to enjoy again the fine 
frenzy of creation, needed more than inde- 
pendence. To revive the spirit which should 
vitally reanimate its enfranchisement it needed 
to drink again from the fountains for which 
it had thirsted for centuries; it must revert 



POE CENTENARY 143 

to something like the unfettered emotional 
freedom of the Middle Ages. To put the 
case a little more distinctly, the romanticism 
of the nineteenth century could be its true 
self only when to the intellectual maturity 
developed by five centuries of classical culture 
it could add full and eager sympathy with 
the emotional freedom of the Middle Ages, 
inevitably ancestral to all modernity. So 
it was a profoundly vital instinct which 
directed the enthusiasm of poets to mediaeval 
themes and traditions, even though these 
were imperfectly understood. The inspiration 
derived from them came not so much from 
any detail of their actual historical circum- 
stances as from their instant, obvious re- 
moteness from the common-sense facts of 
daily experience — matters judiciously to be 
handled only by the colorless activity of 
intellect. It was remoteness from actuality 
which above all else made romantic your 
romantic ruins and romantic villains, your 
romantic heroines, your romantic passions 
and your romantic aspirations. Yet even 
your most romantic poet must give the airy 
nothings of his imagination a local habitation 



144 POE CENTENARY 

and a name. Unreal and fantastic though 
they might be, they must possess at least some 
semblance of reality. And this semblance, 
whether bodily or spiritual, normally assumed 
a mediaeval guise. 

Throughout Europe such semblance could 
always be guided, controlled, and regulated 
by the pervasive presence everywhere of 
relics, material or traditional, of the mediaeval 
times thus at length welcomed back to the 
light. So far as the full romantic literature 
of Europe deals with mediaeval matters, 
accordingly, or so far as intentionally or 
instinctively it reverts to mediaeval temper, 
it has a kind of solidity hardly to be found 
in the poetic utterance of its contemporary 
America. For, at the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century, America was not only 
consciously further than Europe from all 
the common roots of our ancestral humanity; 
it possessed hardly a line of what is now ac- 
cepted as our national literature. As patriots 
and as men of their time, the poets of America 
were called on to add their part to romantic 
expression. To give their expression sem- 
blance of reality they had no mediaeval relics 



POE CENTENARY 145 

to guide them, nor enduring local traditions, 
thick and strong about them. They were 
compelled to rely on sheer force of creative 
imagination. Pretentious as that phrase may 
sound, it is animated by a spirit of humility. 
Its purpose is in no wise to claim superiority 
for the romantic literary achievement of our 
country. It is rather, by stating the magni- 
tude of our national task, to explain ouf 
comparative lack of robust solidity, and to 
indicate why the peculiar note of our country 
must inevitably have been a note of singular, 
though not necessarily of powerful, creative 
purity. 

Now just such creative purity is evidently 
characteristic of Poe. It may sometimes 
have seemed that among our eminent men 
of letters he is the least obviously American. 
A little while ago, indeed, when I again 
turned through all the pages of his collected 
works, I was freshly surprised to find 
how little explicit trace they bore of the 
precise environment where they were written. 
Throughout all their length, it seemed, there 
was not a single complete page on which a 
stranger might rest proof that it had come 



146 POE CENTENARY 

to the light in this country. The first ex- 
ample which occurs to me — it happens to be 
also the most generally familiar — will show 
what I have in mind : the mysterious chamber 
where the Raven forces uncanny entrance is 
not American. The image of it originated, 
I believe, in a room still pointed out. Yet, 
so far as the atmosphere of it is concerned, 
that room might have been anywhere; or 
rather, as it lives far and wide, it is surely 
nowhere. Yet, all the while, it has strange 
semblance of reality. What is true here proves 
true throughout. The Paris of Poe's detective 
stories is no real Paris ; the House of Usher 
never stood, or fell, on any earthly continent; 
Poe's maelstrom whirls as fantastic as the 
balloon or the moon of Hans Pfaal. One 
might go on unceasingly, recalling at random 
impression after impression, vivid as the most 
vivid of dreams, and always as impalpable. 
There is nowhere else romantic fantasy so 
securely remote from all constraining taint of 
literal reality; there is none anywhere more 
unconditioned in its creative freedom. And 
thus, paradoxical though the thought may at 
first seem, Poe tacitly, but clearly and tri- 



POE CENTENARY 147 

umphantly, asserts his nationality. No other 
romanticism of the nineteenth century was 
ever so serenely free from limitation of ma- 
terial condition and tradition; none, therefore, 
was so indisputably what the native roman- 
ticism of America must inevitably have been. 
Call his work significant, if you like, or call 
it unmeaning; decide that it is true or false, 
as you will, in ethical or artistic purpose. 
Nothing can alter its wondrous independence 
of all but deliberately accepted artistic limita- 
tions. In this supreme artistic purity lies not 
only the chief secret of its wide appeal, but 
at the same time the subtle trait which marks 
it as the product of its own time, and of its 
own time nowhere else than here in America, 
our common country. 

American though Poe's utterance be, the 
while, it stays elusive. When one tries to 
group it with any other utterance of his time, 
one feels again and afresh the impression of 
its temperamental solitude. This solitude is 
far from prophetic or austere; it is as remote 
as possible from that of a voice crying in 
the wilderness. Nor indeed was America, in 
Poe's time, any longer a wilderness wherein 



148 POE CENTENARY 

a poet should seem a stranger. Even though 
when the nineteenth century began there was 
hardly such a thing as literature in America, 
the years of Poe's life brought us rather 
copiousness than dearth of national expres- 
sion. As a New Englander, for example, I 
may perhaps be pardoned for reminding you 
that in the year 1830 Boston could not have 
shown you a single enduring volume to dem- 
onstrate that it was ever to be a centre of 
purely literary importance. Twenty years 
later, when Poe died, the region of Boston 
had already produced, in pure literature, the 
fully developed characters, though not yet the 
complete and rounded work, of Emerson, and 
Longfellow, and Lowell, and Holmes, and 
Whittier and Hawthorne. For the moment, 
I call this group to mind only that we may 
more clearly perceive the peculiar individuality 
of Poe. In many aspects, each of the New 
England group was individual, enough and 
to spare; no one who ever knew them could 
long confuse one with another. Yet individual 
though they were, none of them ever seems 
quite solitary or isolated. You rarely think 
of any among them as standing apart from 



POE CENTENARY 149 

the rest, nor yet from the historical, the social, 
the religious or the philosophic conditions 
which brought them all to the point of poetic 
utterance. Now Poe was in every sense their 
contemporary; yet the moment you gladly 
yield yourself to the contagion of his poetic 
sympathy, you find yourself alone with him — 
aesthetically solitary. You might fancy your- 
self for the while fantastically disembodied — 
a waking wanderer in some region of un- 
alloyed dreams. American though he be, 
beyond peradventure, and a man of his time 
as well, he proves beyond all other Americans 
throughout the growingly illustrious roll of 
our national letters, resistant to all imprison- 
ment within any classifying formula which 
should surely include any other than his own 
haunting and fascinating self. 

This isolation might at first seem a token 
of weakness. For enduring as the fascination 
of Poe must forever be, — even to those who 
strive to resist it and give us dozens of wise 
pages to prove him undeserving of such atten- 
tion, — the most ardent of his admirers can 
hardly maintain his work to be dominant or 
commanding. Except for the pleasure it gives 



150 POE CENTENARY 

you, it leaves you little moved; it does not 
meddle with your philosophy, or modify your 
rules of conduct. Its power Jies altogether 
in the strange excellence of its peculiar beauty. 
And even though the most ethical poet of 
his contemporary New England has immor- 
tally assured us that beauty is its own excuse 
for being, we can hardly forget that Emerson's 
aphorism sprang from contemplation of a wild 
flower, in the exquisite perfection of ephemeral 
fragility. A slight thing some might thus 
come to fancy the isolated work of Poe — the 
poet of nineteenth century America whose 
spirit hovered most persistently remote from 
actuality. 

If such mood should threaten to possess us, 
even for a little while, the concourse here 
gathered together should surely set us free. 
That spirit which hovered aloof sixty and 
seventy years ago is hovering still. It shall 
hover, we can now confidently assert, through 
centuries unending. The solitude of weak- 
ness, or of fragility is no such solitude as 
this ; weak and fragile solitude vanishes with 
its earthly self, leaving no void behind. Soli- 
tude which endures as Poe's is enduring 



POE CENTENARY 151 

proves itself by the very tenacity of its endur- 
ance to be the soHtiide of unflagging and in- 
dependent strength. Such strength as this is 
sure token of poetic greatness. We may grow 
more confident than ever. We may unhesi- 
tatingly assert Poe not only American, but 
great. 

And now we come to one further question, 
nearer to us, as fellow-countrymen, than those 
on which we have touched before. It is the 
question of just where the enduring work of 
this great American poet should be placed in 
the temperamental history of our country — 
of just what phase it may be held to express 
of the national spirit of America. 

That national spirit — the spirit which ani- 
mates and inspires the life of our native land — 
has had a solemn and a tragic history. From 
the very beginning of our national growth, 
historic circumstance at once prevented any 
spiritual centralization of our national life, 
and encouraged in diverse regions, equally es- 
sential to the completeness of our national 
existence, separate spiritual centers, each true 
to itself and for that very reason defiant of 
others. So far as the separate phases of our 



152 POE CENTENARY 

national spirit have ever been able to meet 
one another open-hearted, they have marvelled 
to know the true depth of their communion. 
But open-hearted meeting has not always been 
possible. And throughout the nineteenth cen^ 
tury — the century in which Poe lived and 
wrought — it was hardly possible at all. 
Americans were brethren, as they were 
brethren before, as they are brethren now, as 
they shall stay brethren, God willing, through 
centuries to come. For the while, however, 
their brotherhood was sadly turbulent. They 
believed that they spoke a common language. 
The accents of it sounded familiar to the ears 
of all. Yet the meanings which those accents 
were bidden to carry seemed writhed into 
distortion on their way to the very ears which 
were straining to catch them. It was an 
epoch, we must sadly grant, of a Babel of 
the spirit. 

So, throughout Poe's time, there was hardly 
one among the many whom the time held 
greater than he to whose voice the united 
spirit of our country could ever unhesitatingly 
and harmoniously respond. What I have in 
mind may well have occurred to you, of Vir- 



POE CENTENARY 153 

ginia, when a little while ago I named the 
six chief literary worthies of nineteenth cen- 
tury New England. They were contem- 
poraries of Poe. They were honest men and 
faithful poets. They never hesitated to utter, 
with all their hearts, what they devotedly be- 
lieved to be the truth. And every one of them 
was immemorially American. Not one of 
them cherished any ancestral tradition but was 
native to this country, since the far-off days 
of King Charles the First. In every one of 
them, accordingly, any American — North or 
South, East or West — must surely find utter- 
ances heroically true to the idealism ances- 
trally and peculiarly our own. Yet it would 
be mischievous folly to pretend that such utter- 
ances, speaking for us all, can ever tell the 
whole story of the New England poets. They 
were not only Americans, as we all are; they 
were Americans of nineteenth century New 
England. As such they could not have been 
the honest men they were if they had failed 
to concern themselves passionately with the 
irrepressible disputes and conflicts of their 
tragic times. They could not so concern them- 
selves without utterance after utterance fatally 



154 POE CENTENARY 

sure to provoke passionate response, or pas- 
sionate revulsion in fellow-countrymen of 
traditions other than their own. 

Even this sad truth hardly includes the 
limitation of their localism. Turn to their 
quieter passages, descriptive or gently an- 
ecdotic. Strong, simple, sincere, admirable 
though these be, they are themselves, we must 
freely grant, chiefly because they could have 
been made nowhere else than just where they 
were. In New England, for example, there 
was never a native human being who could 
fail to recognize in "Snow Bound" a genuine 
utterance straight from the stout heart of his 
own people; nor yet one, I believe, who, smile 
though he might at his own sentimentality, 
could resist the appeal of the "Village Black- 
smith." But we may well doubt whether any 
Southern reader, in those old times, could have 
helped feeling that these verses — as surely as 
those of Burns, let us say, or of Wordsworth 
— came from other regions than those familiar 
to his daily life. 

The literature of New England, in brief, 
American though we may all gladly assert it 
in its nobler phases, is first of all not American 



POE CENTENARY 155 

or national, but local. What is thus true ot 
New England is generally true, I believe, of 
literary expression throughout America. Turn, 
if you will, to the two memorable writers ot 
New York during the first quarter of the 
nineteenth century — Washington Irving and 
James Fenimore Cooper. They were good 
men, and honest men of letters, and admirable 
story-tellers. Neither of them, however, 
wasted any love on his neighbors a little to 
the eastward; both hated the unwinsome sur- 
face of decadent Puritanism; and neither un- 
derstood the mystic fervor of the Puritan 
spirit. So, even to this day, a sensitive reader 
in New England will now and again discover, 
in Irving or in Cooper, passages or turns of 
phrases which shall still set his blood faintly 
tingling with resentment. Whatever the posi- 
tive merit, whatever the sturdy honesty of 
most American expression in the nineteenth 
century, it lacked conciliatory breadth of feel- 
ing. Its intensity of localism marks it, what- 
ever the peacefulness of its outward guise, as 
the utterance of a fatally discordant time. 

Now it is from this same discordant time 
that the works of Poe have come down to us; 



156 POE CENTENARY 

and no work could have been much less in- 
spired by the local traditions and temper of 
New England. To his vagrant and solitary- 
spirit, indeed, those traditions must have been 
abhorrent. New England people, too, would 
probably have liked him as little as he liked 
them. You might well expect that even now, 
when the younger generations of New Eng- 
land turn to his tales or his poems, sparks of 
resentment might begin to rekindle. In one 
sense, perhaps, they may seem to; for Poe's 
individuality is too intense for universal ap- 
peal. You will find readers in New England, 
just as you will find readers elsewhere, who 
stay deaf to the haunting music of his verse, 
and blind to the wreathing films of his un- 
earthly fantasy. Such lack of sympathy, how- 
ever, you will never find to be a matter of 
ancestral tradition or of local prejudice or of 
sectional limitation; it will prove wholly and 
unconditionally to be only a matter of in- 
dividual temperament. Among the enduring 
writers of nineteenth century America, Poe 
stands unique. Inevitably of his country and 
of his time, he eludes all limitation of more 
narrow scope or circumstance. Of all, I be- 



POE CENTENARY 157 

lieve, he is the only one to whom, in his own 
day, all America might confidently have 
turned, as all America may confidently turn 
still, and forever, with certainty of finding 
no line, no word, no quiver of thought or of 
feeling which should arouse or revive the con- 
sciousness or the memory of our tragic 
national discords, now happily for all of us 
heroic matters of the past. The more we 
dwell on the enduring work of this great 
American poet, the more clearly this virtue 
of it must shine before us all. In the temper- 
amental history of our country, it is he, and 
he alone, as yet, who is not local but surely 
enduringly national in the full range of his 
appeal. 

As I thus grow to reverence in him a 
wondrous harbinger of American spiritual re- 
union, I find hovering in my fancy some lines 
of his which, once heard, can never be quite 
forgotten. To him, I believe, they must have 
seemed only a thing of beauty. He would 
have been impatient of the suggestion that 
any one should ever read into them the prose 
of deeper significance. It was song, and only 



158 POE CENTENARY 

song, which possessed him, when he wrote the 
words — ■ 

If I could dwell 
Where Israfel 

Hath dwelt, and he where I, 
He might not sing so wildly well 

A mortal melody, 
While a bolder note than this might swell 

From my lyre within the sky. 

And yet is it too much to fancy that to-day 
we can hear that bolder note swelHng about 
us as we meet in communion? None could 
be purer, none more sweet. And none could 
more serenely help to resolve the discords 
of his fellow-countrymen into enduring har- 
mony. 



POE CENTENARY 159 

Dr. C. Alphonso Smith, of the University 
of North Carohna, spoke on "The Ameri- 
canism of Poe:" 

The continental tributes to Poe which were 
read this morning recalled an incident in 
which the name of the founder of this Uni- 
versity and the name of its most illustrious 
son were suggestively linked together. In 
the Latin Quarter of Paris it was my fortune 
to be thrown for some time into intimate com- 
panionship with a young Roumanian named 
Toma Draga. He had come fresh from 
Roumania to the University of Paris and was 
all aflame with stimulant plans and ideals for 
the growth of liberty and literature in his 
native land. His trunk was half filled with 
Roumanian ballads which he had collected 
and in part rewritten and which he wished to 
have published in Paris as his contribution to 
the new movement which was already revolu- 
tionizing the politics and the native literature 
of his historic little motherland. He knew not 
a word of English but his knowledge of 
French gave him a sort of eclectic familiarity 
with world literature in general. Shakespeare 



160 POE CENTENARY 

he knew well, but the two names that were 
most often on his lips were the names of 
Thomas Jefferson and Edgar Allan Poe. 
Time and again he quoted in his impassioned 
way the Declaration of Independence and the 
poems of Poe with an enthusiasm and sense 
of personal indebtedness that will remain to 
me as an abiding inspiration. 

Let the name of Toma Draga stand as evi- 
dence that the significance of genius is not ex- 
hausted by the written tributes of great 
scholars and critics, however numerous or 
laudatory these may be. There is an ever- 
widening circle of aspiring spirits who do not 
put into studied phrase the formal measure 
of their indebtedness but whose hands have 
received the unflickering torch and whose 
hearts know from whence it came. And let 
the names of Jefferson and Poe, whose far- 
flung battle-lines intersected on this campus, 
forever remind us that this University is dedi- 
cated not to the mere routine of recitation 
rooms and laboratories but to the emancipa- 
tion of those mighty constructive forces that 
touch the spirits of men to finer aspirations 
and mould their aspirations to finer issues. 



POE CENTENARY 161 

In an address delivered at the exercises at- 
tending the unveiling of the Zolnay bust of 
Poe, Mr. Hamilton W, Mabie declared that 
Poe alone, among men of his eminence, could 
not have been foreseen. "It is," said he, "the 
first and perhaps the most obvious distinction 
of Edgar Allan Poe that his creative work 
baffles all attempts to relate it historically to 
antecedent condition; that it detached itself 
almost completely from the time and place 
in which it made its appearance, and sprang 
suddenly and mysteriously from a soil which 
had never borne its like before." That Mr. 
Mabie has here expressed the current concep- 
tion of Poe and his work will be conceded by 
every one who is at all in touch with the vast 
body of Poe literature that has grown up since 
the poet's death. He is regarded as the great 
declasse of American literature, a solitary 
figure, denationalized and almost dehuman- 
ized, not only unindebted to his Southern en- 
vironment but unrelated to the larger Ameri- 
can background, — in a word, a man without a 
country. 

My own feeling about Poe has always been 
different, and the recent edition of the poet's 



162 POE CENTENARY 

works by Professor James A. Harrison, re- 
producing almost four volumes of Poe's 
literary criticism hitherto inaccessible, has con- 
firmed a mere impression into a settled con- 
viction. The criticism of the future will not 
impeach the primacy of Poe's genius but will 
dwell less upon detachment from surround- 
ings and more upon the practical and repre- 
sentative quality of his work. 

The relatedness of a writer to his environ- 
ment and to his nationality does not consist 
primarily in his fidelity to local landscape or 
in the accuracy with which he portrays rep- 
resentative characters. Byron and Browning 
are essentially representative of their time and 
as truly English as Wordsworth, though the 
note of locality in the narrower sense is negli- 
gible in the works of both. They stood, how- 
ever, for distinctive tendencies of their time. 
They interpreted these tendencies in essen- 
tially English terms and thus both receptively 
and actively proclaimed their nationality. If 
we judge Poe by the purely physical standards 
of locale, he belongs nowhere. His native 
land lies east of the sun and west of the moon. 
His nationality will be found as indeterminate 



POE CENTENARY 163 

as that of a fish, and his impress of locality no 
more evident than that of a bird. No land- 
scape that he ever sketched could be identified 
and no character that he ever portrayed had 
real human blood in his veins. The repre- 
sentative quality in Poe's work is to be sought 
neither in his note of locality, nor in the 
topics which he preferred to treat, nor in his 
encompassing atmosphere of terror, despair, 
and decay. But the man could not have so 
profoundly influenced the literary craftsman- 
ship of his own period and of succeeding 
periods if he had not in a way summarized 
the tendencies of his age and organized them 
into finer literary form. 

If one lobe of Poe's brain was pure ideality, 
haunted by specters, the other was pure intel- 
lect, responsive to the literary demands of his 
day and adequate to their fulfillment. It was 
this lobe of his brain that made him not the 
broadest thinker but the greatest constructive 
force in American literature. He thought in 
terms of structure, for his genius was essen- 
tially structural. In the technique of effective 
expression he sought for ultimate principles 
with a patience and persistence worthy of 



164 POE CENTENARY 

Washington; he brought to his poems and 
short stories an economy of words and a hus- 
bandry of details that- suggest the thriftiness 
of Frankhn ; and he both reahzed and suppHed 
the structural needs of his day with a native 
insight and inventiveness that proclaim him of 
the line of Edison. 

The central question with Poe was not 
"How may I write a beautiful poem or tell 
an interesting story?" but "How may I pro- 
duce the maximum of effect with the minimum 
of means?" This practical, scientific strain in 
his work becomes more and more dominating 
during all of his short working period. His 
poems, his stories, and his criticisms cannot 
be thoroughly understood without constant 
reference to this criterion of craftsmanship. 
It became the foundation stone on which he 
built his own work and the touchstone by 
which he tested the work of others. It was 
the first time in our history that a mind so 
keenly analytic had busied itself with the 
problems of literary technique. And yet Poe 
was doing for our literature only what others 
around him were doing or attempting to do 
in the domain of political and industrial 



POE CENTENARY 165 

efficiency. The time was ripe, and the note 
that he struck was both national and inter- 
national. 

Professor Miinsterberg/ of Harvard, thus 
characterizes the intellectual qualities of the 
typical American : "The intellectual make-up 
of the American is especially adapted to 
scientific achievements. This temperament, 
owing to the historical development of the 
nation, has so far addressed itself to political, 
industrial, and judicial problems, but a return 
to theoretical science has set in; and there, 
most of all, the happy combination of inven- 
tiveness, enthusiasm, and persistence in pur- 
suit of a goal, of intellectual freedom and of 
idealistic instinct for self-perfection will yield, 
perhaps soon, remarkable triumphs." He 
might have added that these qualities may be 
subsumed under the general term of construct- 
iveness and that more than a half century 
ago they found an exemplar in Edgar Allan 
Poe. 

It is a noteworthy fact, and one not suffi- 
ciently emphasized, that Poe's unique influ- 
ence at home and abroad has been a structural 

1. In "The Americans," p. 428. 



166 POE CENTENARY 

influence rather than a thought influence. He 
has not suggested new themes to Hterary 
artists, nor can his work be called a criticism 
of life; but he has taught prose writers new 
methods of effectiveness in building their plots, 
in handling their backgrounds, in developing 
their situations, and in harmonizing their de- 
tails to a preordained end. He has taught 
poets how to modulate their cadences to the 
most delicately calculated effects, how to re- 
enforce the central mood of their poems by 
repetition and parallelism of phrase, how to 
shift their tone-color, how to utilize sound- 
symbolism, how to evoke strange memories 
by the mere succession of vowels, so that the 
simplest stanza may be steeped in a music as 
compelling as an incantation and as cunningly 
adapted to the end in view. The word that 
most fitly characterizes Poe's constructive art 
is the word convergence. There are no parallel 
lines in his best work. With the opening 
sentence the lines begin to converge toward 
the predetermined effect. This is Poe's great- 
est contribution to the craftsmanship of his 
art. 

Among foreign dramatists and prose writers 



POE CENTENARY 167 

whose structural debt to Poe is confessed or 
unquestioned may be mentioned Victorien 
Sardou, Theophile Gautier, Guy de Maupas- 
sant, Edmond About, Jules Verne, Emile 
Gaboriau, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard 
Kipling, Hall Caine, and Conan Doyle. In 
English poetry the debt is still greater. "Poe 
has proved himself," says the English poet- 
critic Gosse, "to be the Piper of Hamelin to 
all later English poets. From Tennyson to 
Austin Dobson there is hardly one whose verse 
music does not show traces of Poe's influence." 
A German critic,^ after a masterly review of 
Poe's work, declares that he has put upon 
English poetry the stamp of classicism, that he 
has infused into it Greek spirit and Greek 
taste, that he has constructed artistic metrical 
forms of which the English language had not 
hitherto been deemed capable. 

But the greatest tribute to Poe's constructive 
genius is that both by theory and practice he 
is the acknowledged founder of the American 
short story as a distinct literary type. Pro- 

2. Edmund Giindel in "Edgar Allan Poe: ein 
Beitrag zur Kenntnis und Wiirdigung des Dichters," 
Freiberg, 1895, page 28. 



168 ' POE CENTENARY 

fessor Brander Matthews^ goes further and 
asserts that "Poe first laid down the principles 
which governed his own construction and 
which have been quoted very often, because 
they have been accepted by the masters of the 
short story in every modern language." It 
seems more probable, however, that France 
and America hit upon the new form inde- 
pendently,'* and that the honor of influencing 
the later short stories of England, Germany, 
Russia, and Scandinavia belongs as much to 
French writers as to Poe. 

The growth of Poe's constructive sense 
makes a study of rare interest. He had been 
editor of the Southern Literary Messenger 

3. See "The Short-Story: Specimens Ilkistrating 
Its Development," 1907, page 25. 

4. "'La Morte Amoureuse' [by Gautier], though 
it has not Poe's mechanism of compression, is other- 
wise so startHngly like Poe that one turns involun- 
tarily to the dates. 'L,a Morte Amoureuse' appeared 
in 1836; 'Berenice,' in 1835. The Southern Literary 
Messenger could not have reached the boulevards 
in a year. Indeed, the debt of either country to the 
other can hardly be proved. Remarkable as is the 
coincident appearance in Paris and in Richmond of 
a new literary form, it remains a coincidence." — In- 
troduction to Professor Charles Sears Baldwin's 
"American Short Stories" (in the Wampum Li- 
brary), 1904, page 33. 



POE CENTENARY 169 

only two months when in comparing the 
poems of Mrs. Sigourney and Mrs. Hemans 
he used a phrase in which lie may be said to 
have first found himself structurally. This 
phrase embodied potentially his distinctive 
contribution to the literary technique of his 
day. "In pieces of less extent," he writes,^ 
"like the poems of Mrs. Sigourney, the 
pleasure is unique, in the proper acceptation 
of that term — the understanding is employed, 
without difficulty, in the contemplation of 
the picture as a zvhole — and thus its effect 
will depend, in a very great degree, upon the 
perfection of its finish, upon the nice adap- 
tation of its constituent parts, and especially 
upon what is rightly termed by Schlegel the 
unity or totality of interest." Further on in 
the same paragraph he substitutes "totality 
of effect." 

Six years later^ he published his now 
famous criticism of Hawthorne's "Twice- 
Told Tales," a criticism that contains, in 
one oft-quoted paragraph, the constitution 
of the modern short story as distinct from 

5. Southern Literary Messenger, January, 1836. 

6. In Graham's Magazine, May, 1842. 



170 POE CENTENARY 

the story that is merely short. After calling 
attention to the "immense force derivable 
from totality," he continues: "A skillful 
literary artist has constructed a tale. If 
wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to 
accommodate his incidents; but having con- 
ceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique 
or single effect to be wrought out, he then 
invents such incidents, — he then combines 
such events as may best aid him in estabhshing 
this preconceived effect. If his very initial 
sentence tend not to the outbringing of this 
effect, then he has failed in his first step. In 
the whole composition there should be no 
word written, of which the tendency, direct 
or indirect, is not to the one preestablished 
design. And by such means, with such care 
and skill, a picture is at length painted which 
leaves in the mind of him who contemplates 
it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest 
satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been 
presented unblemished, because undisturbed; 
and this is an end unattainable by the novel." 
In 1846 he publishes his "Philosophy of 
Composition"'^ in which he analyzes the 

7. In the April number of Graham's Magazine. 



POE CENTENARY 171 

structure of "The Raven" and declares that 
he confined the poem to about one hundred 
Hnes so as to secure "the vastly important 
artistic element, totality or unity of effect." 
In 1847, in a review of Hawthorne's "Mosses 
from an Old Manse," he republishes^ with 
hardly the change of a word the portions 
of his former review emphasizing the im- 
portance of "totality of effect." The year 
after his death his popular lecture on "The 
Poetic Principle" is published,^ in which 
he contends that even "The Iliad" and 
"Paradise Lost" have had their day because 
their length deprives them of "totality of 
effect." 

This phrase, then, viewed in its later 
development, is not only the most significant 
phrase that Poe ever used but the one that 
most adequately illustrates his attitude as 
critic, poet, and story writer. It will be 
remembered that when he first used the 
phrase he attributed it to William Schlegel. 
The phrase is not found in Schlegel, nor any 

8. In the November number of Godey's Lady's 
Book. 

9. In Sartain's Union Magazine, October, 1850. 



172 POE CENTENARY 

phrase analogous to it, Schlegel's "Lec- 
tures on Dramatic Art and Literature" had 
been translated into English, and in Poe's 
other citations from this great work he 
quotes accurately. But in this case he was 
either depending upon a faulty memory or, 
as is more probable, he was invoking the 
prestige of the great German to give 
currency and authority to a phrase which 
he himself coined and which, more than any 
other phrase that he ever used, expressed 
his profoundest conviction about the archi- 
tecture of literature. The origin of the 
phrase -is to be sought not in borrowing but 
rather in the nature of Poe's genius and 
in the formlessness of the contemporary 
literature upon which as critic he was called 
to pass judgment. Had Poe lived long 
enough to read Herbert Spencer's "Philoso- 
phy of Style," in which economy of the 
reader's energies is made the sum total of 
literary craftsmanship, he would doubtless 
have promptly charged the Englishman with 
plagiarism, though he would have been the 
first to show the absurdity of Spencer's con- 
tention that the difference between poetry 



POE CENTENARY 173 

and prose is a difference only in the degree 
of economy of style. 

Schlegel, it may be added, could not have 
exerted a lasting influence upon Poe. The 
two men had little in common. Schlegel's 
method was not so much analytic as historical 
and comparative. His vast learning gave 
him control of an almost illimitable field of 
dramatic criticism while Poe's limitations 
made his method essentially individual and 
intensive. The man to whom Poe owed most 
was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The influence 
of Coleridge grew upon Poe steadily. Both 
represented a curious blend of the dreamer 
and the logician. Both generalized with 
rapidity and brilliancy. Both were masters 
of the singing qualities of poetry, and both 
were persistent investigators of the principles 
of meter and structure. Though Coleridge 
says nothing about "totality of effect"^*' 

10. The nearest approach is in chapter XIV of the 
"Biographia Literaria:" "A poem is that species of 
composition, which is opposed to works of science, 
by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not 
truth; and from all other species (having this object 
in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing 
to itself such delight from the whole, as is compati- 
ble with a distinct gratification from each component 
part." 



174 POE CENTENARY 

and would not have sanctioned Poe's appli- 
cation of the phrase, it is undoubtedly true 
that Poe found in Coleridge his most 
fecundating literary influence. 

In his admiration for Coleridge and in 
his antipathy to Carlyle, Poe was thoroughly 
representative of the South of his day. The 
great Scotchman's work was just beginning 
and Coleridge's career had just closed 
when Poe began to be known. Carlyle and 
Coleridge were both spokesmen of the great 
transcendental movement which originated 
in Germany and which found a hospitable 
welcome in New England. But transcen- 
dentalism in New England meant a fresh 
scrutiny of all existing institutions, social, 
political, and religious. It was identified 
with Unitarianism, Fourierism, the renuncia- 
tion of dogma and authority, and the increas- 
ing agitation of abolition. "Communities 
were established," says Lowell, "where every- 
thing was to be common but common sense." 
The South had already begun to be on the 
defensive and now looked askance at the 
whole movement. Coleridge, however, like 
Burke and Wordsworth, had outgrown his 



POE CENTENARY 175 

radicalism and come back into the settled 
ways of institutional peace and orderliness. 
His writings, especially his "Biographia 
Literaria," his "Statesman's Manual," and 
his "Lay Sermon," were welcomed in the 
South not only because of their charm of 
style but because they mingled profound 
philosophy with matured conservatism. No 
one can read the lives of the Southern leaders 
of ante-bellum days without being struck 
by the immense influence of Coleridge and 
the tardy recognition of Carlyle's message. 
When Emerson, therefore, in 1836, has 
"Sartor Resartus" republished in Boston, 
and Poe at the same time urges in the 
Southern Literary Messenger the republica- 
tion of the "Biographia Literaria," both are 
equally representative of their sections. 

But Poe as the disciple of Coleridge rather 
than of Carlyle is not the less American 
because representatively Southern. The in- 
tellectual activity of the South from 1830 
to 1850 has been on the whole underrated 
because that activity was not expended upon 
the problems which wrought so fruitfully 
upon the more responsive spirits of New 



176 POE CENTENARY 

England, among whom flowered at last the 
ablest group of writers that this country- 
has known. The South cared nothing for 
novel views of inspiration, for radical reforms 
in church, in state, or in society. Proudly 
conscious of her militant and constructive 
role in laying the foundations of the new 
republic, the South after 1830 was devoting 
her energies to interpreting and conserving 
what the fathers had sanctioned. This work, 
however, if not so splendidly creative as 
that of earlier times, was none the less 
constructive in its way and national in its 
purpose. Poe's formative years, therefore, 
were spent in a society rarely trained in subtle 
analysis, in logical acumen, and in keen 
philosophic interpretation. 

Though Poe does not belong to politics 
or to statesmanship, there was much in com- 
mon between his mind and that of John C. 
Calhoun, widely separated as were their 
characters and the arenas on which they 
played their parts. Both were keenly alive 
to the implications of a phrase. Both 
reasoned with an intensity born not of im- 
pulsiveness but of sheer delight in making 



POE CENTENARY 177 

delicate distinctions. Both showed in their 
choice of words an element of the pure 
classicism that lingered longer in the South 
than in New England or Old England; and 
both illustrated an individual independence 
more characteristic of the South then than 
would be possible amid the leveling influences 
of to-day. When Baudelaire defined genius 
as 'i'aflirmation de I'independance indi- 
viduelle," he might have had both Poe and 
Calhoun in mind; but when he adds "c'est 
le self-government applique aux oeuvres 
d'art," only Poe could be included. Both, 
however, were builders, the temple of the 
one visible from all lands, that of the other 
scarred by civil war but splendid in the very 
cohesiveness of its structure. 

I have dwelt thus at length upon the 
constructive side of Poe's genius because it 
is this quality that makes him most truly 
American and that has been at the same time 
almost ignored by foreign critics. Baudelaire, 
in his wonderfully sympathetic appraisal 
of Poe, considers him, however, as the 
apostle of the exceptional and abnormal. 



178 POE CENTENARY 

Lauvriere/^ in the most painstaking inves- 
tigation yet bestowed upon an American 
author, views him chiefly as a pathological 
study. Moeller-Bruck/- the editor of the 
latest complete edition of Poe in Germany, 
sees in him "a dreamer from the old mother- 
land of Europe, a Germanic dreamer." Poe 
was a dreamer, an idealist of idealists; and 
it is true that idealism is a trait of the 
American character. But American idealism 
is not of the Poe sort. American idealism 
is essentially ethical. It concerns itself 
primarily with conduct. Poe's Americanism 
is to be sought not in his idealism but in the 
sure craftsmanship, the conscious adaptation 
of means to end, the quick realization of 
structural possibilities, the practical handling 
of details, which enabled him to body forth 
his visions in enduring forms and thus to 
found the only new type of literature that 
America has originated. 

The new century upon which Poe's name 
now enters will witness no diminution of 

11. "Edgar Poe, sa vie et son oeuvre: etude de 
psychologie pathologique." Paris, 1904. 

12. "E. A. Poe's Samtliche Werke." Minden i. W., 
1904. 



POE CENTENARY 179 

interest in his work. It will witness, however, 
a changed attitude toward it. Men will ask 
not less what he did but more how he 
did it. This scrutiny of the principles of his 
art will reveal the elements of the normal, 
the concrete, and the substantial, in which 
his work has hitherto been considered defective. 
It will reveal also the wide service of Poe to 
his fellow-craftsmen and the yet wider 
service upon which he enters. To inaugurate 
the new movement there is no better time 
than the centennial anniversary of his birth, 
and no better place than here where his 
genius was nourished. 



180 POE CENTENARY 

Dr. Kent, in naming the recipients of the 
Poe medals, said : 

Mr. President : Your committee of ar- 
rangements has deemed it wise to have 
prepared a significant memorial of this inter- 
esting celebration which. is now coming to a 
happy close. Through the kindness and 
liberality of a young alumnus of the 
University of Virginia, we have been able to 
procure from Tiffany a beautiful bronze 
medal, bearing upon the reverse the seal of the 
University of Virginia, and on the obverse the 
profile of Edgar Allan Poe, with the date 
of his birth, and a reminder of this centenary. 
We have selected as the recipients of this 
medal those who were active in procuring 
for the University of Virginia the Zolnay 
bust of Poe; those who have contributed to 
the success of this present celebration; and 
others who by signal services in fixing or 
furthering the fame of Poe have deserved 
well of his alma mater. I have the honor 
to announce to you as worthy recipients of 
this medal the following: 

The medals in commemoration of this 



POE CENTENARY 181 

Centennial of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe 
are bestowed : — 

On The University of Virginia: 

Library of the University of Virginia, 
Colonnade Club, 
Jefferson Society, 
Raven Society. 

On the following who contributed sig- 
nificantly to the success of the movement to 
commemorate the poet with a bronze bust: 

Sidney Ernest Bradshaw, of Furman Uni- 
versity, 

Paul B. Barringer, president of Virginia 
Polytechnic Institute, 

William A. Clarke, Jr., of Butte, Mon- 
tana, 

James W. Hunter, of Norfolk, Va., 

Hamilton W. Mabie, of New York, 

Carol M. Newman, Virginia Polytechnic 
Institute, 

William M. Thornton, University of 
Virginia, 

Morris P. Tilley, of the University of 
Michigan, 

Lewis C. Williams, of Richmond, Va., 

George Julian Zolnay, of St. Louis, Mo. 



182 POE CENTENARY 

On the following who, by committee 
service, participation in the exercises, con- 
tribution of poems, etc., have contributed to 
the success of this occasion : — 

Edwin Anderson Alderman, of the Uni- 
versity of Virginia, 
W. A. Barr, of Lynchburg, 
James C. Bardin, of the University of 

Virginia, 
Arthur Christopher Benson, Magdalene 

College, Cambridge, 
Edward Dowden, Trinity College, Dublin, 
Philip F. du Pont, of Philadelphia, Pa., 
Richard Dehmel, of Germany, 
Georg Edward, of Northwestern Uni- 
versity, 
Alcee Fortier, of Tulane University, 
William H. Faulkner, of the University 

of Virginia, 
James Taft Hatfield, of Northwestern 

University, 
Charles W. Hubner, of Atlanta, Georgia, 
John Luck, of the University of Virginia, 
Walter Malone, of Memphis, Tennessee, 
Herbert M. Nash, of Norfolk, Va., 
F. V. N. Painter, of Roanoke College, 
Va., 



POE CENTENARY 183 

Willoughby Reade, of the Episcopal 
High School, 

E. Reinhold Rogers, of Charlottesville, 
Va., 

Charles Alphonso Smith, of the Univer- 
sity of North Carolina, 

Robert Burns Wilson, of New York, 

Barrett Wendell, of Boston, Mass., 

Leonidas Rutledge Whipple, of the Uni- 
versity of Virginia, 

James Southall Wilson, of William and 
Mary College. 

On the following for literary services of 
various sorts connected with fixing and 
furthering the fame of Edgar Allan Poe : — 

Palmer Cobb, of the University of North 

Carolina, 
John Phelps Fruit, of Missouri, 
Armistead C. Gordon, of Staunton, Va., 
James A. Harrison, of the University of 

Virginia, 
John H. Ingram, of London, England, 
Charles W. Kent, of the University of 

Virginia, 
Emile Lauvriere, of Paris, 



184 POE CENTENARY 

Abel Le franc, of Paris, 
John S. Patton, of the University of Vir- 
ginia, 
Father John B. Tabb, of St. Charles Col- 
lege, 
William P. Trent, of Columbia Uni- 
versity, 
George E. Woodberry, of Massachusetts, 
John W. Wayland, of the University of 

Virginia, 
Mrs. Susan Archer Weiss, of Richmond, 

Va., 
Samuel A. link, of Tennessee, 
Henry E. Shepherd, of Baltimore, Md., 
Robert A, Stewart, of Richmond, Va., 
Thomas Nelson Page, of Washington, 

D. C, 
George A. Wauchope, of the University 
of South Carolina. 

For peculiar services to the University of 
Virginia, in connection with Poe : — 

Mrs. Henry R. Chace, of Providence, 

R. I., 
Miss C. F. Dailey, of Providence, R. I., 
Miss AmeHa F. Poe, of Baltimore, Md., 
Miss Bangs, of Washington, D. C, 



POE CENTENARY . 185 

Miss Whiton, of Washington, D. C, 
Miss Sara Sigourney Rice, of Baltimore, 
Md. 

As representatives of the Poe family: — 

W. C. Poe, of Baltimore, Md., 

Miss Anna Gertrude Poe, Relay, Md. 

Mr. Freeman's programme of music for the 
evening included Mendelssohn's Priest's 
March from Athalia, arranged for the organ 
by Samuel Jackson; Bach's Toccata in D 
minor; Moszkowski's Serenata, arranged for 
the organ by Arthur Boyse; Schubert's Mili- 
tary March in D major (by request), ar- 
ranged for the organ by W. T. Best. 



VII 

NO. 13 WEST RANGE: A POE 
MUSEUM 

TOURING the Centenary Celebration the 
-*-^ room which Poe occupied while a student 
was used as a museum for Poeana. It was 
opened on January 16 under the auspices of the 
Raven Society, and visitors were admitted until 
the 20th. A considerable collection of Poe mate- 
rial was displayed. These memorials included 
the bronze bust of Poe designed by Zolnay; 
an oil painting- of the Fordham Cottage by 
Sadakichi Hartman; an autographed letter 
of the poet's ; the lace cap of his sister Rosalie ; 
the entire library of Poe literature presented 
to the University of Virginia Library by Dr. 
James A. Harrison, editor of the Virginia 
edition of his works; a stuffed raven pre- 
sented by an alumnus from Montana; a num- 
ber of framed letters and poems by distin- 
guished literary men; engravings of Poe's 

186 



POE CENTENARY 187 

residences; and a very interesting group of 
portraits of the author at various periods of 
his Hfe. This material was lent by the Uni- 
versity of Virginia, members of its faculty, 
and friends. 

This little room, 13 West Range, is the 
only spot at the University of Virginia actu- 
ally reminiscent of the living Edgar Allan 
Poe. That he did pass here and there on the 
grounds is of course true; but that he dwelt 
and dreamed in this dormitory has been satis- 
factorily proven. It was the home of the 
poet. Here he studied and wrote for the bet- 
ter part of a year; here on the bare walls he 
sketched the charcoal studies that served as 
decorations; here on the last night of his res- 
idence at the University he split a rough deal 
table to furnish fire-wood. And to this spot 
as to a shrine came many visitors during the 
Centenary Celebration. 

The room itself is one of the row of dormi- 
tories built under Jefferson's direction about 
eighty-five years ago. It forms part of what 
is called "West Range," a long line of single 
cloistral cells, in front of which extends a 
covered walk or arcade, formed by the over- 



188 POE CENTENARY 

hanging roof supported by square brick col- 
umns. It looks toward the west, giving a 
view of the misty reaches of the Blue Ridge, 
and nearer, toward the south, of the broken, 
tree-clad Ragged Mountains, — the scene of the 
poet's sohtary rambles and lone communings. 
Over the door is a simple bronze tablet, the 
gift of Miss Whiton and Miss Bangs of Wash- 
ington, D. C, bearing the inscription : Do- 
nms parva magni poetcs. 

Within the single door is a severely bare 
apartment. The room is about twelve by 
fourteen feet in dimensions, with a compara- 
tively low ceiling. It contains one window 
opposite the entrance, and on the right a grate 
fireplace with a plain wood mantel shelf. On 
either side of the mantel are recesses a couple 
of feet deep. What it looked like in the poet's 
day can only be conjectured, but it was prob- 
ably much the same as at present; indeed, 
there is sufficient evidence to uphold the be- 
lief that despite the hard use to which univer- 
sity dormitories are subjected, the floor, 
though patched, is composed in the main of 
the very boards across which Poe's restless 
feet paced, and that the mantel is the same 
before which he brooded during long watches. 



POE CENTENARY 189 

For many years the room was used as a 
dormitory inhabited by a succession of super- 
stitious or hero-loving students. About 1900 
and for three years thereafter the room was 
the office of Professor Richard H. Wilson, of 
the Department of Romance Languages, In 
1906 the University turned the room over to 
the Raven Society, an honorary society com- 
posed of the literati and scholars of the insti- 
tution. This organization had taken the title 
of Poe's famous poem for its name, and a 
silhouette of that solemn bird as its insignia. 
To do its patron honor, it desired to fit out 
his old room. In 1907 a committee was ap- 
pointed, but, owing to financial difficulties, 
could accomplish nothing. The fall of 1908 
a committee composed of L. R. Whipple, 
chairman; R. M. Jeffress, and J. B. Holmes, 
was selected by The Ravens from their num- 
ber to furnish the room. 

The society voted money from its own 
treasury, and sent out an appeal to its alumni 
members. The latter responded generously, 
and with the funds secured from these sources, 
the committee was able to carry out its in- 
tention. After the consideration of several 



190 POE CENTENARY 

plans it was decided to decorate and furnish 
the apartment as a student's room in Poe's 
time. The place had fallen into a state of se- 
rious disrepair. With the assistance of the 
University and Dr. W. A. Lambeth, the nec- 
essary changes were made. Two unsightly 
closets were removed, the floor was strength- 
ened, the mantel adjusted, the walls plastered 
and tinted, and the paint renovated. 

Then with the co-operation of the Biggs 
Antique Company of Richmond, Virginia, and 
a firm of decorators in St. Louis, Missouri, 
the furnishing was partly completed. The 
furniture is all solid mahogany, of the period 
of 1830, and most of the pieces are genuine 
antiques. Of particular interest is a heavy set- 
tee which at one time was in the Allan home 
in Richmond. The table, chairs and hangings 
conform to this style. The room has been 
suitably marked, and partly furnished, and 
with the contributions that will doubless come 
with the years, will finally contain worthy 
memorials to the poet's fame. 



D 



VIII 
IN THE MINDS OF MEN 
R. Alois Brandl, University of Berlin 



It is not so easy to give a true estimate of 
Poe's mission. He was a man of the imagi- 
nation, and he did a great deal towards rous- 
ing the imagination of New Englanders. He 
was a literary pioneer. It meant a great deal 
in his day to build a poetical hunting lodge; 
the temples of literature had to follow. I am 
not acquainted enough with America to feel 
the specifically American elements in him; he 
is rather a Coleridge, separated from his Eng- 
lish surroundings and transplanted on Massa- 
chusetts soil; a Coleridge without a Words- 
worth at his side, without a Napoleon to fight 
with, but in a colonial country, vast and peace- 
ful and still in the making. A German will 
always feel reminded of E. T. A. Hoffman, 
for, like him, Poe was one of the few invent- 
ors that Teutonic literature can boast of, while 

191 



192 POE CENTENARY 

the fabulistic faculty is more frequent among 
Romance people. Altogether it has been a 
good idea of the University of Virginia to 
celebrate the birthday of an author who is 
known to the educated of all nations as one 
of the most fascinating "makers" of America. 

President Paul B. Barringer, Virginia Poly- 
technic Institute : 

I have always been an admirer of Poe, not 
only as our greatest literary genius, but as a 
"good, safe, household poet." Poe is one of 
the few writers of that day and time whose 
every line is so clean and free from taint that 
it can be put into the hands of one's twelve- 
year-old daughter. 

If those critics who always insist on judg- 
ing Poe's work by the side light of morality 
would take the internal evidences of moral 
cleanliness found in his work itself, rather 
than the uncertain evidences of loss of stamina 
which come to us through manifestly biased 
tradition, their task would be simpler. When 
a man's natural inclination towards literary 
cleanliness is so strong that it cannot be un- 
done by a life of misfortune, poverty, and 



POE CENTENARY 193 

physical suffering, he should at least be given 
credit for his better instincts. 

Dr. Sidney E. Bradshaw, Furman University: 

In spite of the efforts of all the critics to 
"place" him in American literature, Edgar 
Allan Poe continues to be read, admired, and 
discussed for the marvelous qualities of his 
verse and prose. There is none like him, and 
whether we agree with one critical judgment 
or another, his work will endure as long as 
the English language is known and read. 

Professor St. James Cummings, South Caro- 
lina Military Academy: 

I should like to see you presiding in such 
a high ceremony of enlarging the realm of 
Poe. And indeed, I should be greatly pleased, 
to vitalize our relations face to face. As you 
may easily guess, I am a devoted hanger-on of 
Poe : and by that I mean that I am one of those 
vvho maintain a breathless and eager attitude 
of suspense and devotion toward the yet un- 
revealed fulness of grace of our poet's soul. 
I hope any day for the oracle to speak with 
finality, and declare the true estate of him 



194 POE CENTENARY 

whose bright spirit has been beating its way- 
through darkness for a season. In my Hop- 
kins days I was allowed to feel the living in- 
fluence of Lanier, who had already left our 
planet. Here in Charleston I have learned 
to know the living influence of Timrod, long 
since departed. I still look for a day — and it 
may be to-morrow — when the Poe beyond 
disclaimer will be disclosed alive and trium- 
phant — an avatar for those who have the faith 
to wait. More than any one else, Poe repre- 
sents the South. Rich and poor, shining and 
dim, passionate in soul yet calling for rights 
on the dictates of cold reason, the poet, the 
people and the province still retain a mystery 
virginal and elusive, but are undeniably en- 
dowed with resources, with a proper genius, 
deep and abiding. The Poe world will some 
time be no figure of speech, but will enjoy a 
day and a night of its own, where the greater 
and the lesser light may beat in splendor 
against the darkness; and the God of har- 
mony will call it good. Hail to the day! 
Your centenary celebration cannot fail to 
awaken for a finer rendition the magic music 
beyond words that he has left in our keeping. 



POE CENTENARY 195 

Dr. Charles W. Dabney, University of Cin- 
cinnati : 

The reference to No. 13, West Range, re- 
minds me that, upon entering the University 
of Virginia, I was first assigned to that room 
and Hved in it for about a month. It was 
a dark, dismal room with a window looking 
out on the backyard, which was in those days 
filled with rubbish, tin cans, etc., thrown out 
from the kitchens of the dining hall, and I 
was very happy to get as soon as possible a 
better room over in one of the Dawson-Row 
houses. The event did not fail, however, to 
make a great impression upon me, and I re- 
member distinctly the traditions I picked up at 
the time. Among others, Mr. Wertenbaker 
told me his usual story about Poe and showed 
me the registration book where he signed his 
name. 

Mr. Hamlin Garland, Chicago: 

I have been a lover of Poe's verse since my 
earliest boyhood and have read almost every 
book and nearly every article about him, ex- 
cept some of the very recent ones, and his 
wonderful power over the imaginations of 



196 POE CENTENARY 

men is still a kind of unaccountable wizardry 
— I mean that the quality that resides in his 
verse and in his best prose is like the magic 
that rises from a strain of really original mu- 
sic. His wizardry does- not vanish with the 
years — at least in my case. To this day, "The 
Raven" has power to thrill me. Worn, hack- 
neyed, if the critic pleases, there is still some- 
thing in this poem and in "The City in the 
Sea" and other of Poe's best verse which defies 
the years. 

Mr, Thomas Hardy, Max Gate, Dorchester, 
England : 

The University of Virginia does well to 
commemorate the birthday of this poet. Now 
that the lapse of time has reduced the insig- 
nificant and petty details of his life to their 
true proportion beside the measure of his 
poetry, and softened the horror of the correct 
classes at his lack of respectability, that fan- 
tastic and romantic genius shows himself in 
all his rarity. His qualities, which would 
have been extraordinary anywhere, are alto- 
gether extraordinary for the America of his 
date. Why one who was in many ways dis- 



POE CENTENARY 197 

advantageously circumstanced for the devel- 
opment of the art of poetry should have been 
the first to realize to the full the possibilities 
of the English language in rhyme and alliter- 
ation is not easily explicable. It is a matter 
of curious conjecture whether his achieve- 
ments in verse would have been the same if 
the five years of childhood spent in England 
had been extended to adult life. That "un- 
merciful disaster" hindered those achieve- 
ments from being carried further, must be an 
endless regret to lovers of poetry. 

Mr. Maurice Hewlett, Old Rectory, Broad 
Chalke, England : 

Nothing that I could say could add to Ed- 
gar Poe's fame. So far as Europe is con- 
cerned he is secure of his immortality. I 
believe myself that he will live as a poet 
rather than as a prose writer; but that he will 
be remembered as a genius, a creature apart, 
one of those rare beings whose power con- 
stitutes a privilege, I have no doubt whatever, 
I rank him, in the quality of his gift, with our 
John Keats. 



198 POE CENTENARY 

Mr. Robert Underwood Johnson, New York : 

Whatever may be said of Poe — and hardly 
any writer has been so praised and so criti- 
cised — his service to letters has been im- 
mense. It seems to me that the chief bases 
of his fame are his original type of imagina- 
tion, which awakens and challenges that fac- 
ulty in his reader; his intense intellectuality, 
and the opulence of his rhythmic resources. 
If his work does not have the close touch with 
real life which is an essential of great writ- 
ing, he has created a realm of his own, in 
which he detains us by a sort of mesmeric 
power, till we find ourselves "moving about 
in worlds not realized." If his voice has not 
the diapason of Emerson, — if it is not the 
vox humana of our more philanthropic day; 
if his theory of beauty in literary composition 
leaves out of account the beauty of conduct, 
nevertheless, he has been for fifty years, and 
still remains, an important and vital influence 
in poetry, fiction and criticism. His name was 
long ago indelibly inscribed in the world's 
Hall of Fame. 



POE CENTENARY 199 

Professor Thomas C. McCorvey, University 
of Alabama: 

* * * The greatest of American poets — one 
of the greatest, in my judgment, of the Eng- 
lish speaking race, "Time at last sets all 
things even," and Poe's alma mater is to be 
congratulated upon the fact that tardy justice 
has slowly but surely determined his rightful 
place in the world of letters as a genius of 
the very highest order. The University of 
Alabama has a special interest in Poe's cen- 
tenary from the fact that one of the first pro- 
fessors in this institution, the late Henry Tut- 
wiler, was a fellow student of the poet at the 
University of Virginia. While the earnest, 
diligent student — intent upon appropriating 
during his college course as much as possible 
of the world's learning — had little in common 
with the erratic child of genius, whose imag- 
ination was even then perhaps "dreaming 
dreams no mortal ever dared to dream be- 
fore," still Dr. Tutwiler cherished, throughout 
his long life, a lively recollection of the youth- 
ful escapades of the poet while they were col- 
lege mates at Charlottesville. 



200 POE CENTENARY 

Dr. Edwin Mims, Trinity College, N. C. : 

The University has every reason to be 
proud of Poe's relation to it. I am sure that 
he was more influenced by the atmosphere of 
the University than many people have thought. 
It is very significant that a Southern Univer- 
sity should place such emphasis upon literary 
work as you do in this celebration. It ought 
to serve to call renewed attention to the im- 
portance of high art in the lives of our people. 

Dr. Frederick Dunglison Power, Garfield Me- 
morial Church, Washington, D, C. : 

I have always felt America's two greatest 
poems were Poe's "Raven" and Bryant's 
"Waterfowl." Starkweather's word is a good 
one : "To use a geographical metaphor, Poe's 
life was bounded on the north by sorrow, on 
the east by poverty, on the south by aspiration, 
and on the west by calumny. His genius was 
unbounded. His soul was music, and his very 
lifeblood was purest art." Had Poe humor 
and human sympathy he would be our great- 
est literary genius. 



POE CENTENARY 201 

Professor Walter Raleigh, University of Ox- 
ford: 

I have the profoundest admiration for Poe; 
and his influence on European literature has 
been enormous. So I hope I may say what 
I feel, that we are stifling ourselves with lit- 
erary anniversaries. I begin to think that 
English literature is dead, and to wish that 
I was not a professor of it, when I see all 
this monumental stone-mason work engross- 
ing the time and attention of literary men year 
after year. Have they nothing worth saying 
for itself that they must search in the calen- 
dar and speak when the clock strikes? We 
have Johnson, Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, on 
hand in England — new season's goods for the 
window to get the reluctant public drawn in. 
It is all very illiterate. But if ever a cente- 
nary was warranted, yours is, — in Virginia, 
and to commemorate a poet who was barely 
recognised while he lived. Pious deeds are 
good; and I should love to see Virginia in its 
daily life; though I prefer to honor Poe by 
reading him. 



202 POE CENTENARY 

Professor Franklin L. Riley, University of 
Mississippi : 

On the occasion of my visit to the Uni- 
versity last summer I found no place on your 
campus more interesting than room No. 13, 
West Range. I am delighted to learn that, 
by making this a "Poe Museum," it will be- 
come a more attractive literary shrine. It is 
especially gratifying to know that the great 
University of Virginia, the alma mater of men 
of letters as well as statesmen, will commem- 
orate in a fitting manner the literary services 
of perhaps the most talented, certainly one of 
the most original, authors connected with its 
history. 

Dr. William James Rolfe, Cambridge, Mass. : 

I have known and loved the poet from my 
first acquaintance with him in my college 
days, sixty years ago. The pocket edition 
of his poems published by Middleton (New 
York) in 1863, has often been a favorite 
companion of mine in travel by sea and on 
land; and, though I have the recent 1903 
edition of his complete works in five volumes, 



POE CENTENARY 203 

I still feel a particular love for that little 
book, so frequently read and reread, and 
associated with so many delightful memories. 
"Annabel Lee" became fixed in my memory 
when it was first printed in 1849, and I can 
never forgot how its tender music and 
sentiment first moved me. 

Professor George Saintsbury, University of 
Edinburgh : 

Thirty-three years ago, when I was en- 
deavoring to make some opening in literature, 
I horrified and almost enraged a magazine 
editor of great note by sending him an essay 
tending to show that Poe, with all his faults, 
was "of the first order of poets." I am of 
the same opinion to-day. 

Professor Erich Schmidt, University of 
Berlin : 

Von Edgar Allan Poe hab' ich schon in 
jungen Jahren starke Eindriicke empfangen 
und bewundere in seinen Werken die seltene 
Vereinigung der kiihnsten Phantasie mit dem 
scharfsten Verstand. 



204 POE CENTENARY 

Miss Molly Elliot Seawell, Washington, D. C. : 

As time passes, the conviction grows that 
Poe had the fire divine, and the mere survival 
of his scanty and incomplete work shows 
it to be of the first quality. It seems a 
sort of reparation for his melancholy and 
unfortunate life that the world which once 
used him very ill should now be eager to do 
him honor. 

Dr. Wilhelm Victor, University of Marburg: 

1st es mir auch nicht moglich, unsere 
Universitat an Ihrem Festtage pers6nlich 
zu vertreten, so gereicht es mir doch zur 
hohen Ehre, als Marburger Professor der 
Englischen Philologie, unsere schriftlichen 
Gliickwiinsche senden zu diirfen. Ich werde 
des Tages in meiner Vorlesung oder in der 
Sitzung des Englischen Seminars gebiihrend 
gedenken und so den Marburger Studenten 
der Englischen Philologie ins Gedachtnis 
rufen, was die gebildete Welt dem Genius 
des Dichters der "Tales of the Grotesque 
and Arabesque" und des "Raven" schuldet. 



POE CENTENARY 205 

Dr. George Armstrong Wauchope : 

South Carolina, where Poe once resided 
and the scene of "The Gold-Bug," gladly 
joins hands with his alma mater in honoring 
his memory. In doing so, we believe that we 
are not only ratifying an act of public justice, 
but honoring this University and the South, 
which gave his radiant name to the nation. 

We can never discharge the unpaid debt 
which the whole country owes to Poe for 
our (Esthetic declaration of independence, 
for he was our prophet of beauty who led us 
willy-nilly out of the wilderness of phi- 
listinism, puritanism, and provincialism. The 
chief causes of the failure in America to 
recognize earlier the great worth of Poe, 
have been, in my opinion, the challenge of 
his strange and abnormal personality, the 
hostility aroused by him as our first searching 
and authoritative critic, the challenge to the 
literary pharisees of the North of his aesthetic 
literary creed, and closely, though perhaps 
unconsciously, associated with the foregoing 
causes, a certain vague though deep-seated 
sectional prejudice. Happily such hindrances 



206 POE CENTENARY 

to a just appreciation are but local and tem- 
porary, and will soon, I believe, actually 
accelerate the crowning and apotheosis of 
Poe. Meanwhile, foreign criticism has hailed 
him thrice-laureled victor in his chosen lists 
— criticism, song, and story — and his fame is 
safely enshrined in the Pantheon of Southern 
hearts. 

Professor Dr. Georg Witkowski, University 
of Leipsic : 

Der Universitat von Virginien spreche ich 
zur Feier von Edgar Allan Poe's hundertstem 
Geburtstag meinen Gliickwunsch aus. An 
der Feier, die einem der Groszen im Reiche 
eigenartiger Phantasiebegabung, einem Er- 
schlieszer ungekannter Tiefen des Seelenlebens, 
einem Dichter von seltenem Formtalent, 
einem Meister unter den Erzahlem aller 
Volker und Zeiten, einem der starksten 
Anreger neuer Kunst gilt, nehme ich im Geiste 
Teil, und wurde ihr gern personlich beiwoh- 
nen, wenn es mir moglich ware. 



POE CENTENARY 207 

Professor Richard Wiilker, University of 
Leipsic : 

Ich danke vielmals fiir diese Ehrung, und 
ware gerne dazu erschienen, um so mehr als 
ich Poe als Dichter ftir origineller und 
damit bedeutender als Longfellow betrachte, 
und damit fiir den ersten Dichter Nord- 
Amerikas erklaren mochte. 

Mr. William B. Yeats, of Ireland: 

I wish very much it were possible for me 
to join with you in doing honor to the 
memory of one who is so certainly the 
greatest of American poets, and always and 
for all lands a great lyric poet. But the 
Atlantic is very wide, and therefore I can 
only send my thoughts and my good wishes 
to you in Virginia. 

Mr. Israel Zangwill, London : 

I thank the University of Virginia for the 
honor of its invitation, and regret that time 
and space oppose themselves to my desires 
to pay honor to the memory of so great a 
creative artist as Edgar Allan Poe. In verse 



208 POE CENTENARY 

he created new poems and new rhythms, 
in criticism he created new methods of 
analysis, in prose he created the romance of 
horror, of treasure-adventure, and of criminal 
mystery. He is one of the few masters of 
the short story, and the true father of 
Sherlock Holmes. While nobody has been 
able to imitate his poetry, his prose has 
created a school in France, in Germany, and 
in England, to say nothing of literatures 
less known to me. The University of Vir- 
ginia may well celebrate the birthday of the 
adopted Virgfinian who ranks as the most 
original of the, authors of America. 



POE CENTENARY 209 

Gree:tings 

Dr. Charles W. Kent, chairman of the com- 
mittee in charge of these exercises, sent greet- 
ings to other assemblages met to honor Poe : 

Mr. Albert E. Davis, the Poe Cottage at 
Fordham : 

We gather in his University room and you 
in his ill-starred cottage to honor the genius 
that has made each domicile a Mecca. 

Dr. Ira Remsen, Johns Hopkins University: 

The University of Virginia, mindful of Bal- 
timore's guardianship of Poe's ashes and your 
University's loyalty to the Southland's poets, 
congratulates city and University alike on the 
tribute they pay to his genius. 

Authors' Club, London: 

The University of Virginia has pride in 
your recognition of her son. 

Dr. George A. Wauchope, University of South 
Carolina : 

The University of Virginia congratulates 



210 POE CENTENARY 

the University of South Carolina on its cele- 
bration of the Poe Centenary. May the land 
that created heroes never forget them! 

Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia Uni- 
versity : 

Jefferson's University hails Hamilton's in 
their common recognition of Poe's genius, 
and yields her State's right in him to the 
world-wide federation of letters. 

Chancellor Henry M. McCracken, New York 
University : 

The University of Virginia greets New 
York University with the hope that the Hall 
of Fame may some day be as hospitable to 
genius as is your University to-day. 

To this the Chancellor responded: New 
York University reciprocates the greeting of 
the University of Virginia, and will gladly 
fellowship with her in communicating to the 
one hundred electors of the Hall of Fame, 
representing all the forty-five states of our 
Union, important facts and enduring senti- 
ments respecting famous Americans. 



INDEX 

Addresses: Alderman 100-107, Edward 73-99, Fortier 
41-72, Kent 34, 41, 73, Nash 26-31, Reade 16-19, 
Smith 159-179, Wendell 117-158. 

Alderman, Edwin A., address, 100-107. 

Barr, William A., reference to Poe, 11-14. 

Dehmel, Richard, 36. 

Edward, Georg, address, 73-99. 

Fortier, Alcee, address, 41-72. 

"Genius," 108. 

Greetings, messages of, 209. 

Jefferson Literary Society, 5; Poe in, 12. 

Kent, Charles W., 32, 34, 41, 73. 

"Lied des Lebens," 40. 

Medals, Poe, 180; recipients, 181-185. 

Music programme, 33, 185. 

Nash, Herbert M., address, 20-31. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, 1-4, Americanism, 159 et seq.; 
in France, 41; in Germany, 73 et seq.; in Jefifer- 
son Society, 5, 7-8; medals of, 180; nationalism, 
117; poems written at the University, 9; room 
(13 West Range), 13. 

Poe museum, 186, 202. 

Poems, 19-25, 37-40, 108-116. 

Raven Society, 15, 35. 

"Raven," Willoughby Reade's interpretation, 16-19. 

Reade, Willoughby, 16-19. 

Smith, C. Alphonso, address, 159-179. 

Thirteen West Range, Poe's room, 13, 186-190, 195, 
202. 

"To Edgar Allan Poe," poems: Rogers, 24; Benson, 
37; Boyd, 38; Dowden, 39; Moomaw, 111. 

Tributes, 191-208. 

Wendell, Barrett, address, 117-158. 

"Whose Heartstrings Are a L"te," 19. 
211 



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